I'm Fed Up with the English Language
I've had it up to here with English!
(In this case, here is somewhere between extremely irritated and an anger that burns with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns).
I mean, I really love the English language and all that crap (I mean, I am an English major), but, at the same time, I sort of think that it's punishment for the sin's of man. Like, now that I'm getting into upper level English classes, my teachers are actually stressing proper grammar and I'm just like "ugh, I hate everything." Like, but actually, I'm so casual about grammar. I use commas incorrectly all the time because I literally don't care at all. I'm just like, "eh, let me stick a comma here...and there...and maybe here and here and here. Comma rules? There are no comma rules. Let the commas run free!".
I mean, in general, the meaning of a sentence is 100% clear weather or not you use a comma correctly. Granted, there are a few exceptions to this rule (hence my ardent love for the Oxford comma), but, in general, I just use commas when I feel like it. I do the same thing with who and whom. I am probably one of fifty people in the world who knows how to use whom correctly, but most of the time I just use who anyway because I think whom sounds dumb. Seriously, who thought that whom was a good idea? When everyone was sitting around making up the English language, did someone say "well now, we have this really good word who that covers every who related situation, but I think that that's too easy so I'm going to stick an M on the end and make it a weird Franken-word. Mwhahaha!"
And I'm just like -_-
Continuing on that tangent, let me just take this opportunity to say that I really hate pronouns. Like, I'm okay with the I, you, me, she stuff, but when you get to the proper use of myself and herself and things like that, I don't even care. Like, I was just reading this grammar book and it was like "never use hisself, it's WRONG!" And I was like, "yes, it is wrong, but, if someone said that to me, I would understand their meaning and, really, isn't that what language is about?" The very word pronoun bothers me. Why do they have to be professional nouns. What about the semi-professional nouns? What about the amateur nouns? I for one would really like to see an amateur noun getting its shot at the big time. If you don't let amateur nouns play, how are they going to learn the rules???
I'm guessing hisself is probably an amateur noun.
And then there's the weird grammar things that are just too unnecessarily stupid for words. Like the whole that vs. which debate. 98% of the time, no one cares whether you use which or that; it has the same meaning and both sound completely natural to a native English speaker. So why does it matter? And then there's the hyphen and the en dash. Does no one else realize that the hyphen and the en dash are exactly the same thing??????? Who's going to know the difference? WHO? I'll tell you who, the fifteen academics whose life work is studying that kind of stuff. In fact, I'm almost 100% that most of those stupid little rules, like always spell out numbers under 100 and put your comma inside the quotes only when the comma comes after the quote, were just made up so that academics could impress each other with their masterful use of punctuation. What kind of sick game is that? Ninety-nine and 99 are the same thing! Why does it matter if you spell it out or not?
Grammar, in my mind, is strictly utilitarian. I'm rigid about use of things like periods and semi-colons and quotation marks because if you use those things incorrectly, it can alter the meaning of the sentence. But no one is going to get confused because you used an en dash instead of a hyphen.
Just sayin'
I mean, I really love the English language and all that crap (I mean, I am an English major), but, at the same time, I sort of think that it's punishment for the sin's of man. Like, now that I'm getting into upper level English classes, my teachers are actually stressing proper grammar and I'm just like "ugh, I hate everything." Like, but actually, I'm so casual about grammar. I use commas incorrectly all the time because I literally don't care at all. I'm just like, "eh, let me stick a comma here...and there...and maybe here and here and here. Comma rules? There are no comma rules. Let the commas run free!".
I mean, in general, the meaning of a sentence is 100% clear weather or not you use a comma correctly. Granted, there are a few exceptions to this rule (hence my ardent love for the Oxford comma), but, in general, I just use commas when I feel like it. I do the same thing with who and whom. I am probably one of fifty people in the world who knows how to use whom correctly, but most of the time I just use who anyway because I think whom sounds dumb. Seriously, who thought that whom was a good idea? When everyone was sitting around making up the English language, did someone say "well now, we have this really good word who that covers every who related situation, but I think that that's too easy so I'm going to stick an M on the end and make it a weird Franken-word. Mwhahaha!"
And I'm just like -_-
Continuing on that tangent, let me just take this opportunity to say that I really hate pronouns. Like, I'm okay with the I, you, me, she stuff, but when you get to the proper use of myself and herself and things like that, I don't even care. Like, I was just reading this grammar book and it was like "never use hisself, it's WRONG!" And I was like, "yes, it is wrong, but, if someone said that to me, I would understand their meaning and, really, isn't that what language is about?" The very word pronoun bothers me. Why do they have to be professional nouns. What about the semi-professional nouns? What about the amateur nouns? I for one would really like to see an amateur noun getting its shot at the big time. If you don't let amateur nouns play, how are they going to learn the rules???
I'm guessing hisself is probably an amateur noun.
And then there's the weird grammar things that are just too unnecessarily stupid for words. Like the whole that vs. which debate. 98% of the time, no one cares whether you use which or that; it has the same meaning and both sound completely natural to a native English speaker. So why does it matter? And then there's the hyphen and the en dash. Does no one else realize that the hyphen and the en dash are exactly the same thing??????? Who's going to know the difference? WHO? I'll tell you who, the fifteen academics whose life work is studying that kind of stuff. In fact, I'm almost 100% that most of those stupid little rules, like always spell out numbers under 100 and put your comma inside the quotes only when the comma comes after the quote, were just made up so that academics could impress each other with their masterful use of punctuation. What kind of sick game is that? Ninety-nine and 99 are the same thing! Why does it matter if you spell it out or not?
Grammar, in my mind, is strictly utilitarian. I'm rigid about use of things like periods and semi-colons and quotation marks because if you use those things incorrectly, it can alter the meaning of the sentence. But no one is going to get confused because you used an en dash instead of a hyphen.
Just sayin'
"Let the commas run free"--I literally LOL'ed.
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