I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar: A Collection of Egregious Errors, Disconcerting Bloopers, and Other Linguistic Slip-Ups by Sharon Eliza Nichols
My rating: 1/5 cats
longer review later. for now: booooooo! (that is an assessment, not a ghost)
okay—review proper. it might surprise some of you to know that poor grammar bothers me, too, despite the way i comport myself here. i might be a lazy typist here on goodreads.com, but this is me at parade rest. i just type so poorly already, like some kind of animal at the keyboard, that it is easier for me to just go zooooom and not bother with punctuation and capitals. this is casual, to me. were i writing a paper or making a nice sign or something more formal—i would tidy it up, grammatically speaking. this book seems to spring from a genuine revulsion towards the misuse of the apostrophe, but she is such a shit writer (and i am writing this at school, far from my book, so i have to double check if she is just the editor, or the writer, but it seemed to have a consistent tone throughout, so i think she was the author) that it loses all humor. yes, people misuse the apostrophe. all the time. and it is upsetting. but a number of things piss me off about this book. one: her targets. several times, it is clear that the sign that have the apostrophe in the wrong place are not signs where english is the first language. many times, the information will be in spanish or some other language, and underneath, there will be a close approximation in english, with a misplaced apostrophe. this doesn’t bother me. if i am in another country, where i do not speak the language, i would be pleased as punch to see that an effort was being made to help me figure out what signs meant, and i wouldn’t be so churlish as to criticize the grammar. jeez. particularly if i was anywhere in asia. i mean, really…the translations into english from any language of the whole continent is so charming that apostrophes are the least interesting thing to observe. i have a mug from japan that says “peekaboo! all smiles and no frowns that’s what i want!” and it is the best. you can’t hate something that is cute. i have tried. two: her comments are not funny. connor has this pet peeve about people who, instead of saying something clever as a retort, just say “oh, it’s too easy…i could say something, but it would be too easy.” he maintains that it is actually not easy, but that it is easy to say “it’s too easy” rather than coming up with something funny. comprennez-vous? so but this book doesn’t even take that escape route. this is supposed to be a humor book. captions should be humorous, not just abusive. so many of her comments are just: “it’s not possessive—you are using the apostrophe wrong!” “‘towels’ means the towel owns it—jeez”…etc. this isn’t funny. this is just an instructional manual on how to use the apostrophe. and it gets old. it’s just page after page of the same old shit. i thought it would be funny, a la cake wrecks, but these are just picky little stupid bullshits. who takes time out of their life to complain about a yard sale sign?? i mean, really. what’s funny on a cake is not funny everywhere. i hate this book.
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