Current music:	O, Lord, It's Hard To Be Humble - Mac Davis
Entry tags:	great moments in journalism, rants, wheeling, your neighbour is just &^$%#@! stupid

"O, Lord, It's Hard To Be Humble..." Dep't.

"An angel sculpture in Crawford, Texas is adorend [sic] with a wedding veil..."

- Caption to a photograph accompanying a story in The Guardian about the wedding of Jenna Bush.

"'The whole town's rapped [sic] up in this thing,' she said..."

- The Guardian's transcription of a statement by a Crawford resident in the same story.

I've been trying - really trying - to not be such a snot when it comes to how people write. It's difficult, because the first thing I usually notice in anything written or printed is the mistake. Errors appear to me to be printed in a different, usually larger and very gaily coloured, font and are accompanied by music, fireworks and a guy pointing and yelling like a child who's seen a delightful puppy: LOOK! LOOK! He spelled it 'their'!!!!!!!

I'm the asshole who once received a letter in my dorm at university from a friend of mine and corrected - with a red pen, no less - the errors I found and sent the letter back to her. I thought it would be funny (I still do, actually), and was surprised to find out that she was deeply insulted and annoyed. Even now, more than twenty years later, I'll be apologizing to her again for bringing it up again. (This is that apology: Steph, I'm sorry. I was (and still remain, though somewhat less so) a prick. I'm trying to be a better person, and I'm grateful that you don't feel compelled to spend your spare time pointing out my flaws, which we all know would be a full-time job anyway.)

But there are still days when I read something that compels me to put aside those noble aspirations to not be such a showoff.

Today is one of those days.

It started innocuously enough. I woke up, came downstairs and made breakfast (a fried egg with cheese and ham on a whole wheat muffin) and went online. In spite of myself I visited the website of the local paper. It's reliably terrible: left-wing only if you're a Nazi, poorly written, and with little local reporting. (When the only mention of a visit by a contender for the presidency of the United States is contained in a letter to the editor three or four days after the fact, you know there's something missing.) Best of all, the ironically-named Intelligencer allows its readers to post comments in response to stories, editorials and letters to the editor.

This morning, it was a comment in response to a letter that got me started. The letter itself was unremarkable, but it inspired one reader to comment:

Aside [sic¹] from being grammatically and punctually [sic²] retarded, this man has a point. West Virginia should have [sic³], and could still be [sic⁴], one of the wealthiest states in the Union. Perhaps the fact that the democratic party [sic⁵] has had a stranglehold on Our [sic⁶] state, and will support a third clinton [sic⁷] administration (Which [sic⁸] instituted NAFTA) will awaken All [sic⁹] WEST VIRGINIANS to the fact that if we do not forcefully present WEST VIRGINIA'S economic opportunities, We will continue to be a state in decline. With no other reason than PARTY politics [sic¹⁰]..[sic¹¹]

It was a spectacular example of Pot calling Kettle black, and it's what caused me to forget my attempts to no be such a snot. You might say I was sic to my stomach.

It forced me to reply.

[T]he next time you think about deriding someone as "grammatically and punctually [sic] retarded," you might wish to make sure that your post is without error.

I counted no fewer than ten errors of grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization or sentence structure in your comment.

It's difficult to credit your arguments when your writing contains, on average, one error for every nine words you've written.

It's also difficult to credit your arguments when the intellectual rigor which underpins them seems equally shaky.

In other words, "Oh, shut the fuck up, asswipe."



¹: "Aside from..."? Come on. Learn to write.
²: "Punctually retarded" means "late." It's apparent from the context of the sentence that the writer means "punctuationally."
³ & ⁴: There's either an incorrectly conjugated verb or an incorrectly used one in this sentence. The writer could have said "West Virginia should have been, and could still be, one of the wealthiest states in the Union," or "West Virginia was, and could still be, one of the wealthiest states in the Union." While both statements would have been grammatically proper, the latter would have been factually incorrect.
⁵: The 'd' and the 'p' in "democratic party" should have been in capital letters.
⁶: The 'O' in "Our" should not have been in capital letters.
⁷: The 'c' in "clinton" should have been in capital letters.
⁸: The 'W' in "Which" should not have been in capital letters.
⁹: The 'A' in "All" should not have been in capital letters.
¹⁰: This is an incomplete sentence.
¹¹: There is no need for the period.
¹²: There is no "¹²". But that doesn't mean the writer's argument that "WV's problems are all the Democrats' fault" isn't an example of just another fuckin' asshole with shit for brains.