My greater internet grammar theory
I never had a problem with “there, their, and they’re” or “your and you’re” throughout the greater portion of my life. All through grade and high schools, and into college I never had any trouble distinguishing. I even looked disdainfully upon the incorrect usage of such, especially from my peers.
And then I started spending more time on the Internet.
Now, much to my eternal shame, I’ll find myself occasionally misusing one of the above. Usually I’m able to correct it before I send the email, publish the comment or whatever, but every once in a while, the wrong word sneaks through.
You have no idea how mortified I am when this happens. It feels either uneducated, unprofessional, or otherwise unfit for publishing. Yes, that’s a somewhat dramatic reaction (especially considering my perpetual and flagrant overuse of commas) but my mother was an editor and I’ve been a heavy reader my entire life.
And it was while thinking of the above that I had a very “Eureka!” moment concerning grammar. [Ed. Note: NERD!]
I read VERY heavily growing up. My house had a couple thousand books and we went to the library nearly weekly. I started reading “adult” books (meaning books whose target audience are adults, not porn) very early on in my life and never stopped loving the idea of words communicating either information or entertainment; it led very directly to my love of the Internet as here was a place where there was almost an infinite amount of both.
But this love of words, it seems, has become my grammatical downfall as the Internet has replaced books and newspapers as the source for the majority of my information and entertainment. Let me rephrase so that my point becomes crystal clear: The Internet, with all it’s unedited and grammatically incorrect user-participatory back and forth, has replaced my highly edited and multiply checked (mostly) grammatically perfect mediums of communication and entertainment.
Now our brains learn to a very large degree through recognition and repetition. My theory, at its core, is simply that through the act of translating “your and you’re” and “there, their, and they’re” from the blog, comment, or post from the grammatically incorrect usage therein, into the proper versions of the words in order to facilitate understanding, my brain has - to a certain degree - gotten used to their interchangeability.
This was never an issue when the main sources of my information and entertainment were, as I stated above, very metculously checked, rechecked, and rechecked again. The Times rarely has an issue of a misplaced homonym, but Twitter does. That process of recognition and translation has led to repetition because it works in the same way that the brain is trained to learn anything else.
In summary, a vile conspiracy between my brain and the entire Internet has laid utter waste to the once perfect visage that was my grammatical usage of homonyms, and I lay prostrate at the feet of the gods of communication that they may rid me of this evil curse.
Also I blame my brain.
And you guys.
Actually most of all I blame you guys.
Add. Note: This does not apply to “its and it’s” because that shit has been impossible for me to understand for going on 29 years now. I mean, at least follow the same basic grammatical rules as every other possessive on the damn language!
