The Second Moon of Adonis

There are a lot of things that annoy me, to varying degrees. A large number of my personal peeves stem from an intolerance for idiots, from those make my job hell by messing with things they don’t understand to those who will blindly vote for any piece of legislation as long as someone tells them it’s what God wants.

Few things get under my skin, however, like getting a good eyeful of bad writing. It’s especially frustrating for me because it’s everywhere. You can’t go to any public forum online without finding multiple examples of bad spelling, abused grammar, or incorrect punctuation. It drives me insane. Nobody likes a grammar cop, but I don’t think there are enough of us. The English language is being murdered in broad daylight, and a crowd is just sitting there watching it die.

Maybe the decline of my native language is a recent development, brought about by giving the masses access to computers. In the pre-PC era, there was a good chance I’d never see another person’s bad writing unless it appeared in a memo at the office. Those who couldn’t write probably didn’t unless it was absolutely necessary, or only in correspondence to someone other than me.

I was raised to choose my words carefully, and to follow basic rules of English. These days, however, my inner proofreader is constantly assaulted with misspellings of the word “lose,” an apparently universal ignorance of where to use a semicolon, and a myriad of other abuses of the only language we Americans ever need to learn. You’d think we could get one right. The rest of the world seems to handle multiple languages a lot more gracefully than the only one we typically bother learning.

It’s one of those things that occasionally embarrasses me about being American. I often get messages from people in non-English-speaking countries that are better-written than many, if not most, of the e-mails I receive from people in my own office. I don’t get it.

Are we Americans less intelligent, in general, than the rest of the world, or do people just not give a damn about whether or not other people think they look like morons?

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