You've all had this coming for a long time now. In fact, you've been wanting, asking for it, you lazy-fingered slackjawed pajamas-in-your-mom's-garage-wearing keyboard monkeys. Too long the nimbly typing denizens of the Great Orange Satan have blithely ushered into digital print an entire host of malapropisms, mistypes, howlers, and boners too numerous to count or even name. Until now. That's right, suckas,* it's clobbering time: sit back as I fly my twin jetplanes of Knowledge and Awesomeness into your looming towers of Agrammaticality and Ignorance. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, accompanied, one hopes, by much frenzied thumbing of dust-covered grammatical primers and style guides, and much looking-up of difficult words in various dictionaries, online and off-. That's right Kossacks: school's in session, and y'all* are gettin' skooled.*
How dare you mistype, humble Kossack, how dare you? Think you not of the great unwashed masses sitting before their glowing screens, those tired, huddled Web-surfers and basement patriots hungry for Freedom's glowing words (properly spelled, of course), for Columbia's dulcet tones? Reck you not that dread goddess Posterity (called Google in this our debased age), able to recall your tiniest mistypes upon a whim? Have you no fear of the fiery pit of public asshattitude into which you cast yourselves by your mistakes, and how each one of them will cry out at you at the Great Grammatical Reckoning with the force of a thousand mouths?** At long last, have you no decency, or, failing that, have you at least the ability to spell decency?
"And who is this Timmyk," say you, "this strutting jackanapes, this self-proclaimed spelling expert, or spexpert, this public scold who berates and harangues us, nay, who even hoots and bleats and hollers at us (like those mean Krazy Kristians at that nice Hindu man's invocation in the Senate last week) as we busy ourselves about the public stage? Who is he to perturb the swift, clear running of these our DaikyKos political waters, once but a digital freshet, now a roaring cascade sweeping all before their path? And who is this snappish, cranky, nasty little bitchass? Doesn't he know this site is about electing Democrats?" This you ask, you ignoramuses, little knowing whom or what you speak of.*** I stand before you as a humble man and schoolmarm, a proud policer of the public highways and byways, a lonely guy sitting at his Mac with his dick in his hands and anonymous assholery on his mind. That's right: I'm here to tell you about misspelling, and to rectify and upbraid your shocking, SHOCKING ignorance therof! I first joined the ranks of Junior Spellers of America in the halcyon Reagan years (Ah, Morning in America! What bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, what joy was it to spell correctly and not be stupid!) in 1982 (it seems like yesterday!), advanced to the rank of Junior Undersecretary for the Waspish Public Correcting of People's Spelling at my college's chapter of Grammar Nazis America, and am now a happy, self-employed trawler of the Internet and its linguistic Wild West, snapping up its innumerable instances of bad spelling and grammar like Leviathan's hungry maw gobbling down plankton. I have authored so many corrections, scoldings, mean one-liners, put-downs that I've lost track: by my last reckoning, I'd say I've fired off over a million rounds of nasty emails and responses (all for the public good, of course). Some call me a nut, some impute to me Ramboish fantasies of holing up somewhere with an arsenal of dictionaries and red pens, singlehandedly reducing entire armies of dim-witted, careless errors to bloody shreds. Some argue that Rabid Grammarians justify the Second Amendment, and that guns must be kept to fend off the predations of the Howling Wolves of Right Thought and Expression; others use us to justify the Second Amendment's repeal, worried that we find a way to shoot off objects other than our mouths, and our victims turn from digital to fleshly. Most just wish we'd go away, and realize it's just a blog, after all, and would really prefer we'd talk about more interesting things like the nonimportance of John Edwards's haircuts, or those sizzling hot Obama Girl ads, or whatever they're called, or any other of the thousands of issues clamoring for a full and thorough blogospheric airing. But just as one doesn't go to war with the army one wants or needs, only the army one has--to quote a learned sage--so one must go Internetting, not with the companions one needs or wants, only those irritating thousands of other bastards who don't agree with one and spell better, too, and can write coherently, fuck them all to hell, goddamn. Thus our Democratic Clang, our "Universal Thump," as Melville quoth, is passed from citizen to citizen, each bringing Dame Reason's light to the other's misguided darkness, according to his or her abilities.
Remember the perils of typing wrongly, remember the hell of having forgotten to spellcheck! Think you on poor DeminZembla, guilty of having protested his furious support, both ideological and fiduciary, for Presidential Candidate Obomba, and the poor blogger's howls of chagrin at his unintended electronic electoral blooper!**** Or consider you the lowly BloggersaurusRex, devoting himself wholeheartedly to the undoubtedly noble, but somewhat salacious, cause of "erecting Democrats." (One presumes BloggersaurusRex is neither an architect nor a sculptor, nor even a sex worker, merely a careless fucktard.) Or consider yourself, lowly Kossack, harboring within your heart a spark of good and the shadow of evil, your mind teeming with pearls of truth that beg to be released from the mucky deep of grammatical ignorance! You must join with me, friends, for peril is everywhere, and danger lurks in the most unexpected places: remember that we must be right each and every time, always vigilant, but error just needs to be right once, and our sentences shall feel its fatal blow. So quit dicking around and learn to spell, folks! No mister nice guy! Remember that your halfassed President Hillary diaries will look much less halfassed if they're spelled somewhat correctly most of the time! (Why compound your ignorance the multiple evils of that Whore of Washington with your ignorance of grammar and usage?) Remember that the phrase "Edwards is a douchebag" loses much of its considerable rhetorical force***** if misspelled: "Eddwards is a douchebag," "Edwards iz a douchebag," and "Edwards is a dushbag" all lack the zip, the zing, the cut and thrust, of the original. (Why weaken your kneejerk ad hominems with kneejerk typing?) And remember, finally, dear Kossacks, remember in your hour of need, which shall come to you swiftly and find you unprepared, remember the dotted red line, which sees all our ills, and which will wash away all our spelling sins, not in its lamblike blood alone, but with its LED-like tiny digital points of happiness and light, too.
To sharpen your ridiculously blunted skills, I present the following Spelling and Grammar Quiz. Pencils at the ready!
- Choose the correct form of the following term:
a. gun nut
b. gunnut
c. gun-nut
d. Ohioan
- Of the following sentences, which uses the serial, or Harvard, comma correctly?
a. DailyKos is filled with cranks, moonbats and shitbirds.
b. Some of the Senate Democrats I'm vociferously disappointed in are Pelosi, Reid, Schumer and Webb.
c. Kossacks are kind, warm, generous, and compassionate; they are also strange, needy, irritating, and creepy.
d. I would happily vote for Edwards, Obama or even Hillary, ugh, but whom I really want to vote for is Al Gore, because he has an Oscar and I have a daddy-savior complex and I get a boner when I hear his stentorian tone when he waddles up to a microphone and berates me for breathing and putting carbon in the atmosphere, and I want there to be no oil shortages or catastrophic global overwarming and I want to keep driving my car and live in the suburbs and keep my laptop, at which I type all day, plugged in all day, and thinking about an improbable Gore candidacy puts me in a Neverlandish kind of world in which I can actually imagine these things all happening, plus I'll have that boner still, I hope.
- Italics are properly used
a. Whenever the fuck I want.
b. For titles of books, plays, films, etc., and for cases of word-as-word usage and in rare moments of emphasis.
c. For making pizza and singing opera and . . . oops, I thought you meant Italians.
d. In diary titles, fuck you very much.
OK, quiz over. Remember, Kossacks, eternal vigilance and excelsior! Let's keep our shining spot on the information superhighway clean and error free! And remember to love yourselves and one another, even when correcting their lamentably stupid mistakes, which prove that they're so much dumber and less cool than you, anyway, which is what you knew anyway, so maybe they need your love even more for all that.
Yours,
Timmyk
________________________________________________________________
*The reader will kindly observe that that proper usage of dialect words such as suckas, charming regionalisms such as y'all, and contractions like gettin' are not, properly speaking, spelling or grammar errors at all, merely proof of linguistic flexibility, a writer with an ear for the common man and woman, and the vibrancy of our democratic tongue. In particular, an Internet author's wittiness, intelligence, and (that most elusive concept!) hipness are to be esteemed in direct proportion to the frequency of his or her usage of names, words, and phrases--such as Biznatch, Bizzle, Blinged out, and Fo' shizzle!--that throb with the heartbeat of our teeming American streets: bonus points for "crosscultural linguistic appropriation," especially if you're a pasty-faced white person whose only contact with ethnic minorities comes from watching movies and TV. You know who you are, byatch.
**Not to be confused with Deborah Jeane Palfrey's forthcoming memoir The Force of a Thousand Tongues: With Appendices Including Dramatis Personae and Telephone List.
***Sigh, yes, I know one's not to end a sentence with a preposition, you silly little person, you. Kindly refer to the deathless words of Winston Churchill (not Rudy Giuliani, the real one), when faced with an aide's tortuously (not torturously, fool, as in "Some of the more tortuously worded sentences I've read on DailyKos grated quite torturously on my soul. What the fuck's wrong with these retards?") anyway, tortuously reworded version of Churchill's immortal speeches: "This is a sentence up with which I will not put." Or viz. my own, humbler riposte to your cavils: "Blow me."
****Though it was noted by quite many waggish Kossacks that Obomba was not an entirely unfitting moniker for the muscular-diplomacy-embracing candidate, eager to shed his youthful sparkle for a more convincing, more statesmanlike, more military-industrial-complex-pleasing, gravitas and bellicosity.
*****And I do mean considerable: would I could meet the Cicero from whose honeyed lips "Edwards is a douchebag" first dropped! I'd kiss those honeyed lips, anoint them with the chrism of my joyous tears!