Look, I’ve always been a dork. A tragic, tragic nerd. If you are reading this site regularly, then you are either:

1) A dork
2) Profoundly interested in the life that dorks lead
3) Writing a paper on how best to abuse dorks
4) A voyeur into how the uncool live their lives.

Let me give you an example.

I just bought that shirt from here. I am going to wear that shirt with relish (as in delight, not as in the piquante green condiment.)

I majored in anthropology with minors in French and English. While it’s true that my French is utter shit these days, and the last time I was in France I tried to speak to a cabbie but wound up blurting some confusing mishmash of French and Swedish, the English has (for the most part) stayed with me. I loved English. And when I say “English”, I of course mean literature because I am a great bit raving nerd whose bookshelves would groan if I didn’t live the sadist dream of making myself clear them out dilligently. But I also loved grammar. Diagramming sentences rocked, big time. And I’m not a purist, because I will start a sentence out with “but” or “and”, rather like I just did (so suck that, my AP English biddie of a teacher!) I will split my infinitives and I do love a good run-on sentence. I’ll abuse commas and accept that the occasional ellipses is a-ok (that would be occasional ellipses. I’m looking at you, popular blogger who hideously overuses them.) I take first, second, and third person and mix them all up, throw them in the air, and confuse them, often in the same post (and in times of caffeine shortage, even in the same sentence). And the word “fuck” is so versatile that it can and will be used in a multitude of ways.

But fuck with grammar and you’ll piss me off. Worse, muck up vocabulary and do it in a way that is not whimsical or tongue in cheek, and I will organize the Word Police and we will come to your home and make you diagram every sentence in War and Peace. I can be hideously intolerant of abusing the English language (the others I can’t speak for and can in fact be condemnded in war crime courts for my own abuse of French, Russian and Swedish, but hey-I was learning.)

Some of my biggest pet peeves:

1) “Irregardless”. There is no such word. If it is regardless, then it must therefore be interpreted as irregardless, yes? When I hear businessmen say “irregardless” in a meeting they have instantly lost my respect, and I silently want to slide a container of pot noodles across the table and tell them to read that, since that’s more on their level.

2) “Ginormous”. Hate, hate, hate. It was added to the dictionary recently as it has become common parlance. This, to me, is Merriam-Webster bending over and taking it up the backside without lube. You do not cave, Merriam-Webster. Ginormous is not a word. You will never, ever hear me use it.

3) “How come”? I don’t know, why? “How come”? What are you, twelve?

4) When I hear singers sing words such as “I want you” I cringe because inevitably it comes out “I wantchoo”. You should not feel compelled to say “gesundheit” to someone singing. There are three words there, none of them involving the -ch consonants. I. Want. You. There are no trains and no sneezing involved.

5) A bit of a regional thing, but I loathe when people say “It cost me 20 pound!” No, darling, see – it might cost you one pound. If there were more than one of those little bugger coins involved, then there’s an -s involved. It cost you “20 poundS.” I hear people say the pound as a singular when it is a plural all the time. I am aware that a pretentious Yank correcting a local someone will equal a big smackdown. I keep my mouth closed, but seriously people you are not helping my ulcer.

6) Also a regional one – “whilst” does my fucking head in. I cannot say it. I will not say it. It’s a purely British thing, I think, but my little American brain screams “Pomposity!” each time it hears the words because Americans do not say “whilst” unless they have a pole up their backside and images of being highfalutin. The British do say it, and I’m having a hard time divorcing my mind from the idea that over here, it’s normal.

7) People need to stop it with the random apostrophes. Seriously. Every time I see a sign saying “DVD’S 3 for £20″ I want to get some white-out and remove the mark. The DVDs do not own anything in that sentence. If you want to say “The DVD’s fucked” then that’s ok because the DVD is something. Likewise “The DVD’s puppy” is ok because the DVD is a canine owner, albeit it’s a little weird that a DVD might have a puppy. If one is trying to indicate pluarlity then just have an S. No need to dress that bad boy up, ok?

8 ) Interwebs/internets. Some humorous individual came up with these two little gems and oh, the laughter! The joviality! The complete whimsy that are those two words! What, add an -s to the end of those to be, what? Cute? Hip? Jaunty? What? The words themselves imply plurality. They represent networks. So by saying “internets” one is saying “communications networks networks. There are fucking loads of them. It’s all networks, all the time.” Leave out the -s. No need to be coy with me, I’ve been here a while.

9) Text speak. People who know me know that there is no chance in hell they’ll be getting a reply from me if their text includes “CUL8R”. Speak English or don’t waste my time. Can’t text very well? Then don’t do it. Jeff was walking around the house the other day saying a completely unintelligable word.

“Dude, what are you saying?” I asked him.

He repeated this sound, something akin to having just had dental surgery and his mouth was still feeling the novocaine love.

“What?”

He said it again. “I got it from the web, but I don’t know what it means,” he said, shrugging.

I realized what he was saying. ” ROFLMAO.” Only he was saying it as a word. See? The world has moved on. The next generation does not know what these words mean. Long may it remain so.

There are probably other examples but I’ve gotten myself worked up here, so I’ll leave my totalitarian behavior behind for a moment. I reserve the right to come back and add one to make the list an even 10, because leaving it at 9 feels wrong (says she, who must have the gas station pump finish in multiples of 5, because she’s a bit ADD like that.)

And, undoubtedly, some sharp crayon is going to pop out of the box and point out a mistake I’ve made somewhere in this post, because that’s inevitable, so let me just say this: Do as I say, not as I do.

Unless you’re here dork hunting.

In which case, give me a running head start?

-S.