Day 34: Grammar Not Seen

I ended up attacking someone today for their repeated ignorance of proper grammar, and being attacked in return (but not by them) for just being picky.

For the record, I am not a grammar Nazi. What I am is dyslexic.

When we speak, we use a dialect that is appropriate to our audience. We may be used to our own, but those that are the most steeped in their own special culture are the first to complain when presented with a dialect outside of their sphere of knowledge. There is a terrible hypocrisy amongst some people against those are literate. The insinuation is that as long as they can be understood, it doesn't matter how difficult they make it for anyone outside of their particular dialect.

Written English is the lingua-franca of the internet. People whose first language isn't English make an effort to learn it so that they can converse with ease with people across the world. Usually with such great success that it's impossible to know if the person you are talking to is French, Serbian, Japanese, Indian, or from just around the corner. Yet when it comes to first-language English speakers, they have a terrible laissez-faire attitude.

They make you stagger through pages of misspellings, through word substitutions, through misunderstandings of idioms born of never actually reading anything but Facebook posts, and have the arrogance to tell you to get over it.

As a dyslexic it took me far longer than average to learn to read and write, was looked down on as slightly backward by some of my peers, and I still maintain an intellectual inferiority complex because of it. I left school with barely a qualification to my name, something that only changed years later when I came at education through interest rather than competition. As a dyslexic, bad writing hurts.

At the moment, while I have a constant migraine it turns from being a faint irritation to a squeezing of my cranium. Normally that means if something is badly written I just don't read it, so please understand if I point something out it is because I wanted to read it, because I thought you had something worthwhile to say. Take it as a compliment, and a point of sympathy.

If you have a lack of education, or difficulty with reading and writing for any other reason, I have sympathy with that. If someone picks people up on every other word, every little typo, then you have every right to be annoyed. If someone points out, though, a repeated mistake you are making, take it as friendly advice, and use it.