Tiny mini-rant

[taimatsu]

A swift rant about something driving me nuts on and off at the moment.

Kittens. People. Two different things.

You are not a kitten. Your friends and social group are not kittens. Bisexuals are not kittens. Only kittens, young instances of the animal commonly called a cat, are, in fact, kittens. Please remember this. Thank you.

Comments

[taimatsu]

You have a point, yes. I don't know why. It's just a big You Are Doing This WRONG feeling, and there are some things which have to be done my way or they are WRONG. Very few things. And I don't often make a big deal of them per number of examples. If I get a hundred emails with crappy SPG I might be snarky about one or two of them. If that happens over a week then that's twice in a week, which seems a lot. Hmm.

There are other things too, but the one I am thinking of is way too complicated to explain.

Crappy spelling etc. does damage my language. Not my language as in the actual words I speak or write - someone's use of 'ur' for 'your' isn't going to infect my brain while I sleep and cause me to wake up thinking in netspeak - but rather in a more general sense. It's that if such things go unchallenged, slowly 'ur mah bestest buddie an i luv u 4eva' will become more and more acceptable and mainstream, and interesting, useful, attractive, beautiful parts of the language will vanish. Already, 'flaunt' and 'flout' which are different words with different meanings, are becoming conflated because people use them wrongly.

All languages evolve, but I'd prefer not to see English evolve into sumth1n lyke di5, y0.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Well, it's their language too, and things come into common usge for a reason.

[taimatsu]

Yes yes, but don't you see, they're WRONG. They are. They just are. Really.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

And the day you can prove that in a court of law is the day the world shall be free of the constraints of poor English.

[taimatsu]

Well, exactly. It's a personal crusade, and people are free to disagree with me, and then ignore and/or flame me if I annoy them too much. But they're still WRONG, and a thousand thousand grammar books, English teachers, librarians, and philologists agree with me.

[kizzie.livejournal.com]

nah...
thats thier opinions n stuff...
opinions are never wrong, you just don't have to agree with them

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are just flouting your knowledge of the English language :-).

My pet peeve is "its" versus "it's". That, and when people do stuff like "I want this approved by Jim and myself," which makes the speaker sound both pompous and stupid, which is no mean feat.

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

Is flouting like flaunting?

[imc.livejournal.com]

No - it's playing a musical instrument.