Posts Inspired by My Sister's Wisdom

I used to be a grammar troll.  I grew out of it when I realised that burning people for their grammatical errors can be really hurtful, made me a complete douche. One day I thought to myself, "A douche is not who you want to be!" and I have been trying hard for the last few years to live and let live, and then mock the grammatically challenged privately, if it came to that.


I think I've been doing a pretty good job.  If someone is making a heinous error, I try to correct him or her on the sly, to spare the embarrassment of a public smackdown, and also, because I think it will help someone if they know not to make the same mistake again.  Imagine how I'd feel if you said "Me and him went to the printer" in front of your boss, and I could have prevented it.


Basically what I'm saying is, I might pull you aside and say "dude, it's 'a lot', not 'alot'", and hope you appreciate I'm doing it to save all faces, so no one has to be this guy.

And, obviously, I don't have perfect grammar; and, obviously, I employ imperfect grammar for stylistic reasons.  See?  Style!


But decisions have to be evaluated when things like this pop up.

Excuse me, but what is a dinning room? Is this the room you enter to go deaf in impeccable style?  My good friend, who lives in the USA, (this is a significant detail; the USA is a place where they don't know the word washroom, among other things, so a breaking point was probably coming for a long time), snapped when she saw this.  She couldn't help it.  She's not a troll, but enough was enough ... she complimented someone's floor and pointed out they misspelled dining room.

But wait—even after showing me this, even after we had both lost our minds at the decline of society, even after she snapped and decided to say something—she didn't go the troll route.  She tried to be nice about it.  Now that's class.

Check this out.  This here is a Valentine I bought off Etsy for Hawk.  Now, I almost didn't buy it because the sentence structure isn't correct.

Technically, this card showcases an incomplete clause.  It should say "I love you more than Commander Riker loves himself" or "I love you more than Commander Riker loves playing his trombone" or "I love you more than Commander Riker loves to stroke his own beard".

But I bought it anyway because what it is trying to say is, "I love you more than I love Commander Riker", which would be just plain bulky on a card.

Hawk loved it. He knows how I feel about Commander Riker, and to know that he's finally topped him in the hierarchy, well, that was a good feeling.  He immediately snapped a picture and posted it onto Facebook where a grammar troll subsequently went ahead and ruined my Valentine's day by BEING A DICK.

I still have a cold, my sister had an encounter with a grammar troll the other day, and I had a partially sleepless night last night.  All of that together gave me ample time to get mad, mentally compose a blog post, and come up with not only a new saying, but a design for it as well, inspired, I admit, by my cruelly insulted Valentine.  I'll leave you with this, then, my (hopefully, you are all thinking, I can tell!) final thoughts on grammar trolling.