“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”
-Alexander Pope
A large part of my frustration, I am certain, is due to falsely inflated expectations. It is a life problem for optimists. Our hope in humanity, and the future, is constantly being dashed on the sharp and jutting rocks of reality.
What frustrates me most, of course, is bad spelling. I’ve learned to accept it, usually. Correct people and they just get snippy. Even, sometimes, people who claim to be writers and lovers of language.
But, there are a few instances where I’ll call people on it. Loose instead of lose, for example. Seriously, if you write it like that, I know you are not a reader of books, and grant far less credence to your opinion than I would have otherwise. Another is one poetry site I belong to, where the idea is to critique other people’s poems. Some people there can be seriously mean and nasty. I mostly just correct people’s spelling. They think I’m shallow. That’s O.K. I can live with shallow. Another case is if it’s a ‘meme’ or, in any event, something with a background color.
Now, I know how easy it is to do those things. The colored backgrounds are available if you just keep it short enough, and since lots of people are used to Twitter, that is not a problem. Even memes are pretty easy to do. You just go to a site that generates them and they walk you right through it. So, it should not be surprising that a lot of people who can’t spell for shit post them.
But, it surprises me just the same. Every damned time. The colored background, or the picture, grabs your attention and there’s an implication that this post is a little more professional, a little bit more worthy of consideration. And then, you see the misspelling. The one that set me off today, which is the irritation acting as the inspiration for this blog, as a grain of sand activates the pearl making substance inside the oyster, was when someone wrote ‘Quite Down,’ when it was clear from the context they meant Quiet Down.
Despite the fact that it’s very easy to edit your own posts, it’s remained up all day unedited and will probably remain that way forever. It could be because the original poster doesn’t know how to edit their own meme – which is why I used that famous quote from Pope at the beginning – but it’s more likely they just don’t give a shit. Some people are like that.
