aut disce aut discedere: things fizzing across my brain...

1) ...apparantly, I'm not (ok, my mother and I aren't) the only knitters in the world who still grok the dead languages. the number of posts in/with latin on the Harlot's recent death-by-leaf entry show this.

one day, we will take over the world. you can join us. we shall be your morpheus- absolvi tuam animam...muahaha...

2) someday, hundreds of years in the future when our current english is to english what middle english/old english is to our english now (feeling like a bad GRE yet?), i.e. understandable only to english professors and people who happened to take the right language (although we've deviated enough from germanic roots that spanish speakers will likely have the best chance of that, which I'm sure would/will drive all the English First people nuts and I looove that!)

ahem. anyway. so. in the future, monty python's Spamalot will surely be performed not as satire but as grandly as we currently perform Tosca or any other can't-understand-it-enjoy (or not) the-music opera.

and, of course, will have all the english professors giggling uncontrollably.

3) if someone corrects your grammar, anonymously, as in a simple

Example A:
{it's = it is, its=possessive},

you can feel free to ignore them if you feel slighted or insulted. but really, you shouldn't. just go "oh." and try to remember next time. or don't. it's your perogative. they're not slamming you. they're not lording their immense grammatical knowledge over you. they're not saying you're stupid. they're just like me. they notice. they can't help themselves, either because of genetics (hi mom) or good teachers (hi Mrs O'Neal, Mrs Nicholson, Mr Dvorak, Mrs Topp, Miss Josephs, Big Dunn) ...they see the error, they MUST fix.

now, on the other hand, if they direct the comment at you and say something like this...

Example B:
{marmotknit, god, you know, you embody everything that is wrong in this world because you just can't care enough to know a stupid third grade contraction, you should be ashamed. its= possessive, it's = it is! get an education!}

then by all means, react in anger. unless they're a personal friend poking fun at you, in which case you still need to react, otherwise other denizens of the blogosphere will rush to your defense and a flame war will have begun.

but if the comment was like example A not example B, then...lighten up. don't immediately rush to post something directed at the corrector saying that unless they're being paid to professionally edit, they shouldn't, because it's bad form. it's really not. I promise. Bad form is B. A is just...a post. if you feel you MUST post a defense...then simply post it. don't direct it to that person.

and you can't say that you shouldn't correct in a blog in a different form of english (either an ESL blog, or whatever), because who wants to be putting something incorrect in print? reason number one why I don't post often in norwegian. that's what drove me crazy when I handed my articles to people at my folkehøgskole to correct because they'd giggle as they read it and then hand it back- uncorrected!- because they thought it was cute and didn't want to offend me.

cute? bad grammar cute? for a published thing? NO!

(and really....if you are in your professional life a published writer....then...you're used to it. you shrug and move on. and seriously, given the post...I'd be too distracted to proofread. I might go back and fix it after things had, you know, calmed down/I was sober again/had fixed the sock, but...then again, I might not. cause I'm lazy.)
4)....and if you spell grammatical incorrectly in your 'don't correct others' post...you just make me UNBEARABLY want to correct it. you have no idea.

my fingers itch, and it ain't just the hives, baby.

AleXander got me started on the icanhascheezeburger website. here's one of my favourites: