While reading the comments below a YouTube video, I came across this gem of an exchange: (names were changed to protect the ignorant)
TheFamousBRT (5 days ago)
It’s melodramatic, not mellow dramatic. I’m only saying as I’m concerned you may write it the wrong way somewhere important and look like a dufus.
frogger733 (5 days ago)
look i typed it fast without even thinking who cares about grammer or vocab really. so theres is no need to be my English teacher on youtube douche. theres grammer errors in my comment why didnt you point those out.
TheFamousBRT (4 days ago)
It’s grammar, not grammer.
As a point of interest, I’m curious how everyone else envisions ol’ frogger733 up there. Personally, I see him as a scrawny 13-year-old boy in need of a bath and a haircut. He wears skate shoes and a t-shirt with skulls on it. He uses words like melodramatic to feel smart even though he can’t spell. He annoys me, yet he’s a figment of my imagination.
But that’s sort of the point. I’ve never met this guy but already I’ve sized him up based on a disheveled handful of words. In a culture stricken with txt msg
abbreviations and emoticons, what do your online communications say about you? I mean, who cares about grammer (sic) or vocab, really?
This guy.
And not because I’m a copywriter, either. Professionally, I’d better know how to spell, where to put my commas and the difference between your and you’re. Of course I make mistakes. I forget how to spell stuff all the time and am, at this point, quite dependent on the squiggly red lines to tell me where I’ve gone wrong. Still, I care.
The English language has such potential, yet so many are content to dance in a tiny corner of the dictionary while an ocean of black on white rests restlessly between a thousand sleeping pages. Shake the dust off, man.
I’m not saying everyone should be waxing eloquent all the time. If everyone were a poet, poetry would only become less interesting. (Impossible, you think to yourself.) In advertising, I almost never get the chance to be poetic. The world is said to read on a sixth-grade reading level, so on a sixth-grade level I must write. But even a sixth grader would flunk if he wrote like Mr. Frogger up there.
Never before has it been so easy to publish your thoughts for all the world to see. Your words are your personal ambassadors to a billion sets of eyes, and they’re the only part of you that most will ever see. What would the web be like if people treated their comments and posts like this was true?
Better, I think. Or at least more peaceful.
