The Grammar Monster

If there is anything that I have a pet peeve for, it's grammar. I must have forgotten about it when I wrote my post on pet peeves, but it's one thing that never fails to annoy me.

And not in the way that you think.

I am a serious stickler for grammar. Yes, I'll let grammar slide by a couple times, and I almost always let it slide in casual emails. But when a person blatantly ignores all rules of punctuation, I get annoyed.

See, I know emails aren't meant to be edited and written all prim and proper. Hell, even I use the most atrocious spellings known to man. But at least I use proper punctuation!

I have a friend who emailed me recently, and I could not understand a word she wrote, because she just couldn't take the two seconds to put a question mark. Is it so hard to take the time to inform your reader whether you wrote a sentence or a question? Yeah, yeah, everyone makes mistakes, but this friend of mine had been on her bad grammar roll for most of the entire email. So I had to say something about it. In the end, it sounded more like a rant in which I asked her not to mock the English language and to use question marks when appropriate.

But oh no. The response was even worse. Up came another "question" that was even more confusing, because a "sentence" was added after it.

It looked like this:

"What do u mean don't mock the English lingo cuz I don't remember doin so????????"

Yup, after I confronted her about her bad grammar, she had to go on and continue using bad grammar. And then add a million unneeded question marks.

I'm pretty sure she meant something like: "What do u mean "don't mock the English language?" [She couldn't even use the right word!] Cuz I don't remember doin so.

See? I wasn't harsh. I didn't change her spelling (aside from lingo to language). Because it wasn't the spelling that bothered me. It was the punctuation. All I wanted her to do, was separate her sentences with a period or two, and put a stupid question mark at the end of a question.

When I got the response to that email, I was just about ready to scream at the world.
The response to my whole explanation on how she didn't use her english properly, and that she just needed to add punctuation marks was this:

"?"

This was me when I saw it: ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? AFTER I SPEND TWO 

EMAILS EXPLAINING HOW TO USE THE FREAKING SHIFT KEY AND QUESTION MARK KEY, YOU SIMPLY GO "?" WHAT THE FREAKING HELL IS CONFUSING ABOUT PUTTING A SQUIGGLY LINE AND A DOT NEXT TO A QUESTION?
Accompanied by this:

Yeah. Of course I didn't write that to her. I mean, I virtually yelled just a little bit. But how many times can a person take repeated offenses?

I told her once, I told her twice, if I needed to tell her a third time, I wasn't going to play nice.

So I went ape on her. If she doesn't understand why I was annoyed I will explode. 

But getting back to my whole grammar pet peeve, I am lenient. I'm not some crazy psychopath who goes insane whenever he/she sees a sentence with bad grammar. I have bad grammar sometimes, too.
But when it comes to punctuation...I can (and will) go crazy.

So there you have it. One of the things in this world that can make me yell/scream/curse at the sky.

#rantover.

~Banana Win