I have been struggling with a topic for my blog post today. When I started the blog it was originally intended to be a documentation of my journey in vocalizing and practicing. However, I’m not inspired to write about music at this time. Hopefully this will change soon. Sometimes I like to record the strange incidents I encounter in the city, but today I will post about grammar. Call me a snob if you wish, there might be some validity to that argument.

I received an email today from a coworker about our new Team Green program. He added “And as always, please practice digression when printing out this or any other emails.” I looked at this sentence for a few moments. Okay. Shall I digress and think or speak of unrelated topics while I print out this email and other emails? Perhaps I should practice discretion. That would make more sense… Discretion and digression, though similar sounding, are not particularly close in spelling. He could have spelled discretion incorrectly, resulting in a word such as “discression,” but the spell-check offers this option: discursion.

In another incident a coworker asked me to read over an email she sent out to a customer. The email began “Affective immediately…” When I brought this up to my coworker she feigned indifference and said that the customer wouldn’t care or even pick up on the typo. Firstly: it is not advanced literary knowledge to discern between the [usual] verb affect and the [usual] noun effect. Please see below:

The effect of this email was distressing.

I am affected by her inability to use proper grammar.

Secondly: poor grammar shows disrespect and laziness. Take the time to understand how the English language works, people. Show others you care enough to think out sentences before you speak or write them, otherwise, you may lose credibility. It is hard to pay attention to content if it is written incorrectly and makes no sense.

Shall I bring up the mini-Malaprop who would exclaim “alas!” when she heard good news? The poor dear didn’t understand.

Then we’ve got the non-existent word “irregardless” surfacing at random. My p.t. boss uses “irregardless” a lot. I cannot correct her because she is my boss. However, I want to save her the humiliation of using that word in public. How did irregardless become incorporated in speech? My guess would be that some are making a connection to relevant and irrelevant.

Thirdly: Read a book once in a while & don’t assume something on the bestsellers list, as a hot summer read, will teach the solid rules. Who cares if it is the social “norm” to use incorrect grammar? Stand out from the crowd!

I do not mean to imply that I know everything about grammar and the English language. I still have a hard time with lay/lie usage (and so does Microsoft spell-check). In a society where the internet is accessible 24 hours a day we have no excuse to not look up the rules of speech.