Speaking About Losing Battles – Let’s Talk About Language

I’m a grammar/correct usage Nazi, and proud of it. I was trained by professionals of that ilk, and still know a couple (who are liable to disagree with me on the finer points, making for spirited argument), but we’re a dying breed. All but extinct. It isn’t just the pervasiveness of Twitter Talk and social media abominations abbreviations, IMHO, LOL; it seems like kids aren’t even being taught to write in complete sentences any more, while their parents and the “influencers” to whom they listen don’t know what a whole host of words actually mean. The latest annoying trend is to do away with capital letters at the start of sentences, e.g.:

i went to the store. there i bought a dictionary and a book on effective writing. i mean to tear out the pages and wipe my bum with them.

This makes me mental.

It all makes me mental. Indeed, I once gave a PowerPoint presentation to the lawyers at my wife’s firm about the abuse of the English language, titled:

My wife had the idea such a lecture might do some good when a junior associate, writing in a memo that was intended for circulation to a client, opined that “their compliance system is amaze-balls”.

No, really.

Anyway, here are some of the slides (and Susan, don’t be telling me I’m getting things wrong. I’m on the brink here). Believe it or not, this is just a sampling. There were plenty more, going over how to use apostrophes, That vs. Which, It’s vs Its, parallel construction, subject-verb agreement, and all sorts of other linguistic sins and malapropisms, all now part of everyday usage, that always drive me right up the frigging wall.

I’ll just leave these here, as one of my many futile, fatalistic gestures of allegiance to the world that was.