Grammar Nazi's and Punctuation Pedant's

People who know me often assume that because of what I do for a living I must be the sort of person who foams at the mouth when I spot a typo in a newspaper article, or that I spend my weekends stomping about town with marker pen and Tippex, adding missing punctuation and erasing unnecessary apostrophes from shop signs.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For a start, if the world wasn’t riddled with examples of horrific grammar, spelling and punctuation, I wouldn’t have a job at all. Mistakes are my bread and butter, literally.

But it’s more than that. Even though I will spend hours picking over a text to make it as flawless as possible; even though I can and do discuss sentence structure until a normal person would start bleeding from the ears; even though I regularly proofread my emails three or four times before I send them, on a day to day level, I really don’t give a flying fuck about typos, misspellings, misplaced apostrophes or less-than-perfect English.

Written English is practically impossible to master. The majority of native English speakers are crap at writing in English, crap at spelling in English and crap at English grammar. This is because English evolved from several different and quite distinct languages, and because it continues to evolve and change at a fairly fast pace. It is a rich, complex and infinitely malleable language, which makes it a joy to speak, difficult to write (unless you have a particular sort of memory and a love of form) and hellish to learn. (It is also difficult to teach, further compounding the problem.) As far as I am concerned, you are doing well if you can string any kind of sentence together in English. If you are using punctuation at all, that’s excellent; who gives a damn if you sprinkle in a couple of extra apostrophe’s here and there?

So, yes, I do see the signs in the supermarket that say ‘Five items or less’ and the traffic sign that says ‘Expect delay’s’; years of training makes it practically impossible for me to miss them, but they don’t bother me. I certainly don’t get out my marker pen or complain to the manager. I certainly wouldn’t do this. And this is mostly just a massive waste of time. As I tell all my students, learn to love your mistakes: if you don’t make em, you’ll never learn.