Am I a grammar (and spelling) snob? I often judge people by how well they spell, and the quality of their grammar. A recent email (from a low-ranking city official) included these items:
"their will be a meeting ..."
and
"This is an importing meeting for you ..."
and
"get them of to a good start"
For those of you who are
Hard Of Spelling it should've said:
"there will be a meeting ..."
and
"This is an important meeting for you ..."
and
"get them off to a good start"
Being the grammar snob that I am, I immediately discounted the importance of this meeting .. after all, if she couldn't
grammar the sentences correctly, what possible good could be included in the meeting's content?
3 comments:
I once worked for a man who corrected (with red pen, no less) a letter and returned it to the sender. Of course, the author was not amused. He (the grammerically challenged letter writer) was a bureaucrat with whatever department had oversight of foreign nationals from communist countries taking jobs (in a supercomputer center) from patriotic Merkins. If I recall the story correctly, when the 'crat phoned my boss, he (the Fed) was told to be more careful when writing to someone who works at a University. Then he (my boss) hung up.
I won't name my boss, to keep his name out of Google, but he was Bard from everywhere he'd ever been.
Have you read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss?
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
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The above story is the source of the title of a book on punctuation by Lynne Truss. See more at http://www.eatsshootsandleaves.com.
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