June 26, 2002 - 12:39 PM
WARNING: America-bashing to follow.
Well...
You know what really, really irritates me?
Stupid, ignorant people.
Really, they do.
Is the American schooling really that bad? Honestly? I was told that students in college over there were learning what is forced on Aussie kids in year 10. You're shitting me right? This girl had been on an exhange program but came home early because she was disgusted.
Now, I admit to the occasional typo and misspelling. See? Look, there's one right there. But I see astoundingly scary spelling and grammatical errors like... everywhere! And it really kills me.
There was one instance today on the message board where a girl has left a message for her bloke and has said "if you get this right back".
Um? Hello? Now what was that in Rennish?
Can we see what's wrong here?
Not only has she written "right" instead of "write", but there's no evidence of even an attempt of seeming like an intelligent lifeform at all. What made it laughably worse was the fac tthat she had, indeed, posted again in an attempt to fix the error.
Or so I thought...
"Wright"
WRONG!
Oh SO wrong.
What's so hard? Write. W R I T E. It's not a difficult word.
I'd place this girl at 16 at least. However at 12, I knew the difference between write, rite, right, and Wright (the last being my friend's sirname). I also new the difference of their, there, and they're.
Are there people that horribly stupid in the world? What are you doing at school? Obviously not learning.
Let's analyse a bit more.
"if you get this right back"
No punctuation is one of the first details. There's a pause in that quasi-sentence.
"if you get this, right back."
With me so far? Okay. Now we're missing a Capital letter.
"If you get this, right back."
Now we do the intelligent thing and check that we are actually using the right word in the write context (pun intended).
"If you get this, write back."
See? Not hard is it? Not really. It just makes you have to think abit more. Obviously your two brain cells (the one that remembers to tell you how to breathe and the one that helps you remember your bame) are calling a strike today.
I'm not saying everyone but me is stupid, but there are some people that just cause me to do a double-take and question their credibility ... as someone with a brain at all. Fortunately I do not have the patience to put up with these people. If you can't string a simple sentence together using the right words, then you're not worth the talking to until you DO learn how.
Either the American school system has something seriously wrong with it, or the students are oh so lazy.
Case in point - I know four people from Norway who have learnt English as a second language. They write and speak better than I do. They know a hell of a lot more than I do regarding punctuation, grammar and general spelling.
English is not their first language!
Can we see the point yet?
