My teaching method does not involve shaming students who make mistakes, and I’m not in the habit of correcting my peers and acquaintances when they make typos or use internet shorthand. I use abbreviations myself when I text message, and I make mistakes when I am distracted or when I’m more concerned with finding out when my daughter needs to be picked up than in writing complete sentences on my phone. Still, I do notice these things, and I cringe inwardly every time I can’t circle an error and ask someone to look up a rule or two and revise.
Thank you, Weird Al, for bringing up some of these points.
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Maria Catherine Smith Bernhardt liked this on Facebook.
By doing such a good job making the kind of video a sterotypical prescriptive grammarian would love, he is opening up for ridicule the excessive zeal with which some people approach the never-ending task of correcting all perceived errors in human communication. Weird Al is so good a nailing so many things. Just as his “White and Nerdy” both celebrates and skewers his subject, I see “Word Crimes” in much the same light. “Blurred Lines” indeed.
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