This is something I posted to a message board tonight. The website I mention at the end featured a store and how-to section -- it wasn't purely personal content. And I understand that some people just can't spell. So please don't hunt me down and kill me.

To weigh in on the whole class/grammar debate:

Clearly most people in the US don't get an education in Standard Written English. This blows, because people whose parents went to college, like me, will probably pick it up at home, whereas people whose parents didn't go to college probably won't, and so the class system is perpetuated. So yes, I think it's stupid to penalize people for "bad grammar" when they never had the chance to learn.

In my earlier post I was wrong to bring up colloquial English -- of which everyone speaks at least one version -- in connection to written English. I do, however, think that the class issue is most relevant when we're talking about colloquial English. The dominant class will spread the view that its dialect is the only correct one and ignore the fact that every dialect has its own consistent grammar. (In Black English, for example, double negatives are used for emphasis. Just because middle-class white people don't use double negatives, we make a lot of Ebonics jokes. This is annoying and stupid, like a lot of the things privileged people do.)

Standard Written English bears some obvious relation to the way rich people speak. I guess this happens for the same reasons that the English we speak is descended from the London version from back in the day.

No, I don't expect people to write in the most formal version of SWE whenever they write. (That would be inappropriate and boring.) The rules of spelling and punctuation, however, exist to make the reader's life easier. And I am not impressed when someone litters their website (for example) with errors or this variety. If someone has Internet access, then they have access to millions of examples of proper spelling and punctuation. If they continue to fuck it up, then they clearly don't care about their readers.

Now done being a bitch for the next 24 hours. _
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