There are a bunch of folks out there who like to get up in our shit. Nitpicking word puritans who like to get all righteous about how we use the English language. You’ll find them in every office, on every forum, blog, twitter feed, and comment section. Verbholes who spend their lives looking for deviances in the mother tongue. Trying to push their idea of good diction onto the world, trying to get everyone to conform to their linguistic conservatism.

They are the joke-killers, the pedants, the bean-counters of the written word. Those dogmatic dicks who can suck the life out of even the most killer comment with some analbomb about its vs it’s or their vs there. WTF? Some dude just threw down what may have been the best joke of the 21st century and your worrying about grammar? That’s like turning down sex with a hot chick because she’s not into missionary. Get out of here! Go home and wank over your dictionary, because we know how hot it gets you. Actually, scrap that plan. Go home and eat your dictionary, hopefully you’ll get ink poisoning and go blind.

Yeah, I know, grammar’s important. Without rules, the entire planet would fall apart. Anarchy would reign, cats would eat dogs, women would wear trousers and men would become stay-at-home dads. And all these bitches are trying to do is keep some order. Yes, I get it. But it’s a lie. These people aren’t just sticklers for the rules, boring bell-ends with nothing better to do. I could almost tolerate them if they were just grammarians. But they are Grammar Aryans. Word fascists who believe their law-abiding sentence structure makes them a better class of human being. That somehow knowing what an Oxford comma is makes them superior to you and me.  Fuck you, I can also use wikipedia. And I speak English, not Anglican. My language is not an XL spreadsheet, it is there to XL spread shit. If good ideas had to rely on a comma or the placement of an auxiliary verb, we’d still be stuck on the King James Bible. And if we had listened to you, those immortal words, To boldly go where no man has gone before, would have read: To go boldly where no man has gone before. How lame.

So the next time you see an errant apostrophe or a dangling particle or whatever it is that gets your goat, and want to start banging on your Grammar Über Alles drum, know this: This is my language, and I be using it how I wants to use it. Done,

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  • David Smith is a world famous artist and a British Olympic hammer thrower. He is a curler for Scotland and Manitoba. A pro wrestler fondly known as the British Bulldog. A Canadian economist and a Mormon missionary they call the Sweet Singer of Israel. He is a British historian and a bishop. David Smith is the biographer of HG Wells, a professor of physics, a composer and a music teacher at Yale. He played rugby for Samoa, England and New Zealand. He created the Melissa worm, a deadly computer virus. He is the Guardian's man in Africa, he starred in a reality TV show and shot his way to silver in the 600m military rifle prone position at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. But this isn't that David Smith. This is the blog of the other David Smith. David J Smith. The one from Durban by the Sea. The one who lives in Amsterdam. Yes, him. The David Smith who likes to write about himself in the third person. To learn about all the other David Smiths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Smith To contact this David Smith: [email protected]

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David J Smith

David Smith is a world famous artist and a British Olympic hammer thrower. He is a curler for Scotland and Manitoba. A pro wrestler fondly known as the British Bulldog. A Canadian economist and a Mormon...

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