Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Headline:

Drive-By Media Turns on John McCain

So is he aroused? Or have they turned against him?

“On”: The all-purpose preposition that can mean anything and nothing at the same time.

For the second year, I’ve been hearing about some stupid alleged “war on Christmas” (The phrase should really be, “war against Christmas”. I wish I could physically pound this idea into the heads of people who say “war on” too much, and generally use “on” as the all-purpose preposition that can mean anything.) where one side twists themselves into some goddamn pretzel trying to make sure they can’t even remotely be thought to offend anyone by either going to great lengths to include every possible permutation of holidays, or producing some greeting so generic as to be meaningless, and another side which gets worked up into a rabid froth because someone didn’t say “Christmas” specifically and exclusively. It’s all very stupid and a complete waste of time.

However, in my desire to get everyone to quit their pointless bitching and deal with the important issues in life, I have devised an all-purpose, meaningful holiday greeting that speaks to a specific, clear idea and leaves nobody out, which is universally understood, and brings a sense of peace, in true [generic end-of-year holiday] fashion, to the greeter, if not the greet-ee.

“Fuck off.”

Seriously. Try saying it out loud right now. Now say it to a coworker, a relative, or one of the endless legions of unhelpful people you come into contact with every 2.8 seconds. It’s liberating and it makes this time of year much simpler in every way.

Fuck off, everybody!

I’ve written what seem to be a few pedantic ravings about writing correctly. This evening, I found a very good example to reinforce my point. While watching my nightly M*A*S*H re-runs, I saw a commercial for cereal. The female voiceover said the following line, which I’ve written as I assume it’s intended:

“Women who eat breakfast, like the Special K breakfast, weigh less.”

I had to pause and think after I heard that to make sure I comprehended the message. If written (or spoken) incorrectly, the sentence could turn out like this:

“Women who eat breakfast like the Special K breakfast way less.”

These two sentences mean totally different things. It’s important to write correctly to convey the intended meaning.

Here is a great example of what I complained about in the last article:

The headline ends with ?, which, as we all know, immediately makes any sentence or sentence fragment a question whether an interrogative word is included or not, and then the first sentence immediately confirms what, just a few words ago, was supposed to be a question in the headline.

Why does this get such a strong reaction from me? Because I consider a certain minimum level of writing aptitude to be good manners for your readership, and writing grammatically deficient, logically inconsistent pages like this is roughly the equivalent of farting in a crowded elevator. I strongly believe that writing is a direct reflection of the mind, and when writing is poorly structured and self-contradictory, it reveals thinking processes with the same problem. Please give credit to my intelligence, and cause me to respect yours, by writing well.

And now for the standard disclaimer: I’m not a perfect writer, nor do I claim to be. I correct my mistakes. My writing mistakes do not excuse the mistakes of others, nor do they diminish my right (duty?) to critique others’ writing. Perfect or not, I’m a damn sight better than the example here.

Take a look at this wallpaper posted on MacDesktops.net:

Can you spot the horrible grammatical error any second grader should be able to correct? The creator’s inability to understand even the most basic usage of the language he speaks and writes (?) every day severely damages his credibility. I find it impossible to take his opinion seriously.