Kevykev, I couldn't possibly take anything anyone writes in this thread personally because, well, I started it
Since this is quite beyond off-topic, this will be my last post in this thread and hopefully I don't get skuzzified
A lot of people my age were in the last few years of high school when the "ebonics" crisis hit our public schools. Some schools were formally recognizing badly malformed English and street slang as a unique "creative" language that was just as academically acceptable as normal English, and this had a huge backlash among students who actually gave a crap about learning and formal education. It hit my school particularly hard because my school was a Southern California "Magnet" school, a school in a lower income neighborhood that was given hiring and budgetary preference in order to attract superb teachers and a more diverse student population. The school was very successful in San Diego and the students took some pride in actually learning, so when the ebonics stories hit the newspapers a lot of students took it as a personal attack against their legitimate efforts at gaining a superior education. It was the literary equivalent to awarding half or full credit for stating that 2+2 = 5 simply because "you're special and we don't want being wrong or ignorant to affect your self esteem." Educators in this country seem to have lost sight of the fact that
ignorance does NOT equal stupidity, and ignorance is usually a correctable situation if a teacher is willing and able to draw the line between right and wrong, fact and fiction, and positively present the right information to a student.
So a lot of grammar nazis were born in a short period of time. I try not to criticize but I must admit that I cringe when I read articles and messages that misuse language and make common errors. Extremely common and simple mistakes like their/there/they're, and one I recently saw in an otherwise excellent computer review, "shear" instead of "sheer", are all over the place and they detract from otherwise excellent writing in a blatantly obvious fashion.
I usually only give in to the urge to write the editor when it's a source like CNN that makes the error
You'd think they could hire an editor who is both educated and picky enough to catch such things.
