Grammer err...Grammar

Yesterday was National Grammar Day. A day where people pay more attention to their punctuation, spelling, and overall use of the English language. While I was on Twitter it was a trending topic that lasted almost the entire day. I should probably add that even though we are limited to 140 characters on Twitter, it's not an excuse to butcher English day in and day out.

I thought that yesterday would be a day where I was free from getting irritated at spelling errors, but I was wrong. Before going in to that I just want to say that my English isn't perfect nor will I ever claim it to be. I've been out of school for years so I've forgotten some of the rules about punctuation and sentence flow, but I can still spell. If I ever come across a word that trips me up, I take the time to look it up and make sure that it's accurate before posting it. I care about it that much. Might seem silly to some, but if English is my native language (in which it is), I'm not going to go and constantly use some "poor mans version" of it. It feels cheap and wrong.... like a two dollar hooker.

Right, on to the spelling error.... I was on Facebook yesterday and a friend of mine, that I made through playing Xbox Live, had made a status update about needing some furniture. Her post was well written and well thought out so she wasn't the offender. After a couple of comments that were from a friend of hers offering some of his old furniture that he wasn't using (a very nice gesture indeed) he created a different comment listing the items. It was when he got to that point where he lost me.

There is a particular piece of furniture called an ottoman. It can be small or somewhat large. It can be round, square, or other shapes. It can also be made from different materials like suede or leather. I'd like to think that 'ottoman' is a fairly easy word to spell. OT-TOE-MAN... in my head that's what it sounds like. Or some people might say that it's like AUGHT-O-MEIN.

Anyways, the guy took it upon himself to spell 'ottoman' as 'audimin.' Somewhat close in sound, nowhere near in the spelling. I couldn't believe my eyes. I seriously wanted to die. The first thing that popped in to my mind was a really small Audi because of the 'min' (like minute... being exceptionally small) part. Maybe it could be a Minute (in reference to time) Audi that goes from 0 to 60 in a flash! I don't know... but what I do know is that I witnessed something terrible.

It's become a common thing to see adults, who had their full 12 years of public education and even some, if not all of their college education, make the simplest of spelling errors. I witness it all the time, especially online. Online it's the worst. I see people that I went to high school with, and I know we got the same quality of education, make the errors all the time but I don't know what happened! Were they completely trashed in high school? Did they just not care or pay attention? They obviously graduated, so why can't they spell something like 'capsule?'

I don't know dear friends, but I will leave you with this tasty morsel:

Last night I was having a chat over the Facebook IM, and I got into a discussion somewhat related to this blog post. I used the word 'travesty.' The person I was chatting with followed that up with "lol travesty. You always use the most awesome words."

Travesty.....

Tee hee?