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I had a whole article written out for this month’s blog. I had taken my time to write a rough draft only to be sidetracked by my own sense of urgency. Call me an elitist, grammar Nazi or whatever term the internet world has bestowed upon us lately. I am not even going to touch on the subject of dyslexia nor the topic of colloquialism. I won’t even get into the boring details of how a language is a form of orderliness in a system used by humans as a means of communication-based on speech, writing, signs, and gestures. I will also not get into how languages have evolved, nor will I get into the anthropological themes of civilizations and cultures. All the aforementioned are not my premise. I will, however, mention that the orderliness of language is its grammar and its free components being vocabulary.
Now let’s divert back to the grammar part and how it creates a structure for a language. Why has it become socially acceptable to use improper basic grammar? I say ‘basic’ for there are certain things that should come naturally to us after middle school. I am not talking about using commas in long sentences, homonym confusion, ending sentences with prepositions, or linking ideas with conjunctions. There are so many rules in grammar. This is where professional editors come in to take over the show. See? I am even getting sidetracked whilst writing this. The soliloquy of my being, to be or not to be. To pluralize with an apostrophe or not to pluralize with an apostrophe?
In a world where people’s mother tongue is English, some can’t seem to grasp the difference between your and you’re. The first is a possessive adjective and the latter is
a contraction of ‘you are’. It always helps by eliminating the contraction of the latter just to get a hang of things. For example, you want to tell someone that they aren’t the sharpest and you want to convey that via text. You don’t know whether to use your or you’re. Just ask yourself, does this person have dumb or is dumb? This person is dumb, right?
Your dumb means they have dumb
You’re dumb means you are dumb.
I have divagated yet again. My issue of the moment is apostrophes being used to pluralize everything and anything. The plural of Karen is Karens, not Karen’s. When you apostrophize Karen that way, you’re forming a possessive of the name, i.e., Karen’s dog. The plural of idiot is idiots, not idiot’s. Apostrophes are not to be used to pluralize nouns of any kind. What I would like to know is who came up with this and why is everyone emulating this behavior? Is it considered elitist to not want to see the pluralization of nouns with apostrophes? Who came up with the idea that only elitists use proper grammar? Have these people even met elitists? Or have we resolved to the fact that utilizing terminologies that exude aristocratic undertones will mask our shortcomings as a collective? A resolve to absolve, dare I ask? Look at me, I sound like those elitists that everyone’s been talking about.