Okay, I'm better than I was. Not so tired, and I've actually been able to make beads rather than just moping around. I'm considering a "how I made these" sort of blog. Wonder if anyone would be interested?
So anyway. I'm currently being wound up by bad English/grammar/punctuation. Not that mine's 100% perfect, but I'm pretty good generally*. It's not that difficult, surely.
Adverbs. When a descriptive word is applied to an action word (verb), almost all of the time it ends in LY. Like a person is graceful, and moves gracefully. Cold wind, wind blows coldly. Can someone please explain this simple rule to Tempest from the new Gladiators, who said on at least 4 occasions the other night, "She did amazing." By the second time I was actually talking to the television.
"LY! AmazingLY! It's an adverb, you silly woman!" or words to that effect.
Misuse of the reflexive. I'm so so sick of hearing, "I spoke to yourself last week", by people who are obviously trying to be polite and don't realise that the word you is perfectly polite, and in fact correct. Similarly, "Who's in charge of this department?" "That would be myself." You use the reflexive when someone's doing something to themselves, i.e. they are both subject and object of the sentence. Such as "I'm proud of myself" or "She accidentally hit herself with a hammer".
And for this next one I blame Facebook. Over the last few months a lot of people I used to know at school have friended* me. Fine. And like a foolish person who doesn't check out Facebook more than a couple of times a week, I subscribe to the feed of my friends' status updates and read it in Bloglines along with all the blogs I like, so I don't miss something important.
Which means I'm getting stuff like this:
"*Insert name here* is guin 2 sheff 2mrw 2 spend sum money"
Not even going to comment. But this kind of thing didn't happen when Facebook was just students, let me tell you. I was going to trawl around and fine a few others for you to enjoy/laugh at/cry over/fail to read at all, but in the end it was just too annoying.
And old school friends (in general)... aren't they DULL?
* I know my writing style isn't textbook, but that's for effect. Not sure what effect, admittedly. Like when I start a sentence with a conjunction such as but or and - I know it isn't correct but I like to do it anyway. I'm a rebel like that.
And I also miss out punctuation because i'm lazy. Like the comma that should come before a set of quotation marks in some sentences. He said, "I is crap at grammar."
*As far as I'm concerned, friend is now also a verb...
Ickworth
1 day ago
Posts
Hehehehe. That stuff annoys the crap outta me too. ;-)
ReplyDeleteFor ages on Facebook now a person who went to school with me (?) has been attempting to 'friend' me.
ReplyDeleteCheck out Kyle Rasheed. He is a particularly shining example to us all. His profile makes me laugh a lot.
I hope you're feeling better lasts. Come singing on Weds I owe you £1.50 so that's at least a free pint!
Wow Kay, why on earth haven't you friended him? He sounds lovely.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, can you introduce me? I want his babies.
My dear young lady (if I may address you in such terms). Here, here!
ReplyDeleteI love making polymer clay beads. Your canework is pretty good. Flowers are fun to make.
ReplyDelete(I hate Facebook, I am on it, but it annoys me!)
nikki
Welcome can bass, always nice to hear from other singers! I'm not usually this complain-y.
ReplyDeleteoh wait, actually I am.
Thanks Nikki, hopefully I'm improving all the time. Need to learn to be patient and wait for the canes to cool before I reduce them. Polyclay = fun, but at the moment I'm suffering from "this is all new and cool and I'm going to try a million different techniques and not get good at any of them or develop a coherent style" syndrome. Loved your leopardskin earrings by the way!
Bad grammar drives me up the wall. It's why I don't watch TV much anymore, but I've noticed it creeping into more print as well. Including our daily newspaper!!! One day, the world will say, "To hell with the rules," and then no one will understand anyone.
ReplyDeleteI firmly believe it's because we don't teach grammar in schools anymore.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was 11 I had an old-fashioned English teacher who insisted that we should all learn how to use language properly. So all we did for the first 6 months of secondary school was boring exercises on punctuation and grammar, usually consisting of chunks of text with no punctuation at all (rather like a Facebook profile!) to write out correctly. Dull, but effective.
After that we were allowed to write stories and such.
It is worrying that one day the rules will evaporate. I was discussing with Michael the other day, and he reckons that doesn't matter as long as you get your point across. Which I think is crap - it's like saying that in football all you need to do is get the ball between the posts and it doesn't matter how you do it.
The world really needs more Grammar Nazis.