Sunday, January 18, 2009

It's all downhill from here...

It's been some time, but this one I couldn't leave alone. From the Yahoo Answers site, I now cut and paste this gem, from someone called Carly H:

she i give girls dress codes checks everyday?

im an 8th grade teacher and theres alot of girls who wear shirts when they put there hands up there stomach shows or they have there belly showing without there hands up should i crack down on this if your a teacher do u crack down on this stories please
OK, where to start? Maybe at the beginning. 'She I give girls dress codes checks everyday?' It seems that Carly actually believes that when asking a dinner host how she might contribute to the meal, she's actually saying: 'She I bring anything?' or 'What she I bring?' Considering that literacy is partly dependent upon the osmotic effect of actually seeing stuff written down, has this 8th grade teacher (hopefully not of English) ever read a book in her life? Or maybe she's only read from that vast literary canon in which the word 'should' never appears?

So those are my thoughts on the first line. The rest u can work out 4 ur selfs.

PS: Mark Taylor, commentating the cricket, just misused the word 'bought' 3 times in one comment, ie 'The captain only just bought up that man from square leg.' This error is disturbingly common.

Here endeth the rant.

5 comments:

Doubter said...

Dear Miss Treacle,

My daughter Melanie Olivia Jones is sick today she is felling bad her stomack hurts a lot so she needs to get off school at Lunch to go to the doctor. If you see her friends Stacy and Petra going to do'nt stop them I think they are sick too.

Regards,

Nancy Jones (my mother)

james roy said...

Shannonr,

u r probly rite, and da thuoght had crosed my mind. Even so, who says 'she I' instead of 'should I'?

pfft.

Doubter said...

That's the giveaway of giveaways. Much more than simply the bad spelling/grammar in the note. It's two sentences. The original was

"She gives girls dress code checks everyday" [don't you think that's weird?]

as a complaint about her teacher. Then she realized it would be much cooler if the "question" was supposedly _from_ her teacher so she "changed" it to:

"I give girls dress code checks everyday"

But made a little editing error in the "title" box.

I have the wrong job.

Adele said...

Last year I lived in an area where it was very common to start sentences with "I seen.." I corrected my students but I was horrified to find that the parents were saying it also. Containing the shudder was near impossible.

Doubter said...

@Adele:

My personal fave sentence containing your pet peeve is the following:

"I seen him come up to her, right, and he aksed her pacifically not to start nothing?"

(The question mark indicates the inevitable rising inflection -- not that the statement is in any way a question.)

*Shudder*