A few weeks ago I titled my little story, Tannin Fanny. I started getting e-mails immediately. “I don’t understand how the paper could allow such spelling mistakes to slip by. You misspelled the title and several other words in the body. You cannot use in instead of ing.” I’d address this to someone except it took about twenty e-mails to convey this simple message. I bet these people are a hoot at a party.
"It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!" -- Andrew Jackson
Where are these people from? I bet it snows a lot there. I bet they don’t eat grits there. I bet their grandmother never sent them out to fetch their own switch and she never said, “when you get back I’m gonna be warmin your backside.”
I know gonna ain’t in the dictionary, but the last time I checked neither was I. Gonna is a word to everybody I know and since they didn’t have a hand in writing the dictionary, what do they care? How else is a poor unworthy word supposed to have its day? Ain’t finally got in, but it took a bunch of regular people refusing to give up on it.
"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way." -- Mark Twain
I write like people speak, well I would if people wouldn’t send out hit men to dispose of me for breaking spelling and grammar rules. I must conform, but I try to keep my pieces as close to real as possible. I know I color outside the lines; it’s a poor pitiful world where the lines are more important than the colors. Maybe the civil war was fought to force us southerners to conform to spellin rules. It didn’t work.
“I hold that a man has as much right to spell a word as it is pronounced as he has to pronounce it the way it ain't spelled” Josh Billings
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to those among you who have endeavored to eradicate the shear ignorance prevalent at this juncture in the history of mankind. Furthermore, I too am devastated by the total lack of respect given to the English language.
Bah humbug, come on we speak the way we are taught to speak. If you can’t figure out what I’m sayin, you might need a north bound bus ticket. If you understand spelling so well, certainly you must have been there the day they talked about colloquialisms.
A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech. There you have it; I’ve done my part for the civilized world, or my not so civilized part of it.
There is a nasty rumor that the printed word is on the way out, newspapers are in decline and the internet is causing it all. I suggest that if the papers would write for their audience instead of writing for a bunch of eighteenth century, old dudes wearing white wigs and living with too much starch in their drawers, they might survive. It’s like feeding the homeless and charging fifteen bucks to get in, like selling ice to Eskimos. Know your customers.
I got a letter back from a paper last week, “we will not be able to publish this piece as you are in it.”
Naw, really, I wrote it, who was supposed to be in it, Napoleon Bonaparte?
“A man occupied with public or other important business cannot and need not, attend to spelling.” Napoleon Bonaparte
“I would have spelled it correctly, but couldn’t look it up in the dictionary, because I couldn’t spell it.” Anonymous
So if you were offended before you are most assuredly offended now. I do try very hard to be the best at what I’m good at. You could move back to a place where they eat boiled pierogies instead of grits. Or if you’re a retired teacher, you could take that greeters job at Wall-Mart to give you something better to do. I will continue to write it like I see it or write it like we say it. Sure I make a few mistakes I don’t mean to make, but many are just true reflections of the American people.
“American English is a string of curse words tied together with idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms. The only people who speak it correctly are immigrants and English teachers and then only when others are listening.” Kennesaw Taylor
I too see the end of the printed word as we know it peeking around the corner, but doubt seriously my use of doubtin is runnin it into the ground.
I’m just sayin.
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