I am, I suppose, what most people would call a Grammar Nazi. The way I see it, I’m just an English teacher and wannabe writer who takes language very seriously. But, if people want to call that being a Grammar Nazi, I can live with it. It gives me more credit than I actually deserve, because I am fairly slack about it, but I’ll take it.
I correct people a lot on the difference between lose and loose, for instance. It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I’m sure people who spell lose as loose are basing this are just trying to write, phonetically, what they have heard and what they have heard is loooooooser!, with at least 7 o’s in it.
I started correcting people whenever I saw that about 2 or 3 years ago, focusing on that specific error because there aren’t enough hours in the day to correct everything, and if I focused on that I could make a difference. I have noticed, on my own particular Facebook page, that the incidences have dropped considerably, although it’s a rare day that I don’t see one or two.
I’ll also correct people on the difference between their, there, and they’re, as well as your and you’re, even though I’ve been known to screw them up myself.
These spelling errors are the type that spellcheck won’t catch, because the misspelling itself is a word. So, when they are writing the post, they won’t see the squiggly red line. I wish people would learn to spell, but I see how these slip through the cracks occasionally.
The one I caught flak over today, though, was correcting somebody who said “A large military budget is nessasary.” Unless his computer is vastly different from mine, he saw a squiggly red line when he wrote it. If you then put your cursor over the squiggly red lined word and right click, you’ll get a box with a list of words you might have meant, and you can just click on that to automatically correct your spelling.
It’s easy. Even a moron can do it.
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