Categories: AmusingCultureEducationLanguageModdingPopCultWriting

Listening to Weird Al’s “Word Crimes.” Awesome.

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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    • Post was last modified on 15 Jul 2014 11:54 am

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    • 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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    Published by
    Dennis G. Jerz
    10 years ago

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