Mel Mignucci ’12
Video Editor

Recently, it seems that nobody can speak correctly.

Grammar Nazis everywhere seethe with rage when u rite like dis.

No lulz, no roflcopter; I am not jk.

 I saw a sign today that spelled championship like ‘chmpionshiop.’ I desperately hope it was an inside joke, or else I will weep for future generations of English speakers.

At Inklings, my favorite job is copy editing, so that I can fix the mistakes of writers who never learned the difference between effect (noun) and affect (verb).

Or how viciously wrong the slang “irregardless” is. It’s not a word. Stop using it.

Quotidian grammar mistakes make me angry, so angry that I want to whip out the closest pen and slash away all the bad, bad mistakes.

I will even correct other people’s text messages. Sometimes this makes me sad.

I’d like to bring up a recent snippet of a conversation I had via text with a friend:

Him: Your tricky as a fox!

Me: By the by, it’s you’re**

Him: texting no require grammar correctness

Me: *_*

This conversation almost made me cry.

Lack of apostrophe aside, texting does require grammatical correctness, especially since it took me a good thirty seconds to realize what he said.

 Then people take it upon themselves to spell out “skewl,” which is only one letter less than school. They are that lazy.

Honestly, the time one saves by abbreviating you to u is so miniscule that it would take more time to come up with the acronyms used online today.

DEWAI—it makes me angry. Don’t know what it means? JFGI.  It’s a new language, people, please get up to speed.

Right now, most people take a foreign language, probably because it’s required by the state.

Okay, fine.

At least they’re learning a language.

 It is unbelievable the mistakes that occur when one never formally learns a language.

Yet every day when a native speaker speaks English, her fluency is debatable.

Those ten minutes of grammar practice you do in English class every few days are not enough.

When fifteen minutes are spent going over the difference between “who” and “whom,” and people still don’t know the difference, there is a problem.

Maybe I’m just a nerd— a nitpicky, nosy nerd.

I did have the luxury of two years of Latin, wherein the nouns are separated into 5 cases– nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative.

Guess what?

It’s basically the same thing in English. The accusative  (read, objective) case ends in an –m, usually, in the singular case.

Remember going over who and whom? He and him? Just remember that during your next grammar quiz.

To whom should I direct my thanks?

Perhaps I should direct them to my language teachers, who stressed the importance of Latin for vocabulary and the SATs. Latin certainly helps in this capacity, but it is the grammar that you will need after you are accepted to college.

If you really want better vocabulary, sign up for Merriam-Webster’s word of the day. Sadly, they’ve yet to make an important-grammar-rule-of-the-day subscription. Maybe it’s not as catchy.

Proper grammar simply makes one sound more educated and refined.

 It adds a certain something to papers, and helps make teachers, who would no longer have to correct tiny grammar mistakes, happy.

Not only that, but it allows you to learn other languages more  easily and allows people who may just be learning English to understand you .

When one complains that Spanish is so hard, he should think about it like this; if he knew the grammar rules in English already, he could understand it and translate it in a way that makes sense to him.

Tell this to the next person who says this, because really, foreign languages are not that hard.

So really, when you’re trying to learn a foreign language, do yourself a favor and learn your native language first.

Be a hero to grammarians everywhere and correct the incorrect use of an adverb (you do not feel badly unless your hands are broken).

 Don’t make up words; you can say unfriend now, thank you Oxford English Dictionary, but not irregardless.

Don’t abbreviate words, period. And keep your sentences short and sexy.

Grammar’s cool. Really.