It Rains, It Pours, So I Write Some More

I'm definitely a fits & starts kind of person.  It's one of the reasons I write, and also work for myself.  I have successfully worked in the corporate world, but it was an uncomfortable fit for me.  I like to do things as the mood strikes.  Maybe that's self-indulgent, but then I don't really care.  I've structured my life in a way that makes me happy, not in a way that others approve of.  I feel it's my duty to contribute to the world, but that doesn't mean I live my life for everyone but myself.  As long as I'm doing something to make the world a better place, I don't feel anyone really has the right to complain about me.  After all, most people seem to live their lives without contributing anything at all, so who are they to judge me?

So, when I start into writing mode I tend to hit all the bases at once, and then take a full break from everything.  Today is apparently a writing day, seeing as I've posted an article on wrytestuff.com, and here I am on my blog.

(On a completely different topic, I would like to know why the spell-checker for this blog actually flags the word 'blog' as incorrect spelling.  Yes, I know it's a shortening of weblog, but it is actually an entry in the dictionary now, so it would make sense that a blogging site such as Blogger would be using a dictionary that includes that particular word.  Not everything in this world makes sense, though.  If it did, I probably wouldn't have anything to write about.  Man, I'm going to get so many errors appear when I do the spell check this time.)

Anyhoo...

I must be in a kind of strange mood.  Strange for me, I mean, which might actually be normal for everyone else.  I'm feeling my humanity today for some reason.  A connection to the world, brought on by the article I just wrote about culture.  Normally I'm an anti-social curmudgeon.  I don't like being around people.  I'm not comfortable in crowds at all.  I care a great deal about people, strangely enough, and my life's ambition is to help improve the lives of people and animals everywhere.  I just can't deal with being around them physically.  My verbal communication skills are extremely limited, in that I have to think about everything I say.  I don't do snappy come-backs.  Part of that may be fear that I'll say something I'll regret later, as that was known to happen in my youth.  However, I'm aware of my limitations to the point where I know even my written words are often misconstrued.

Language is such a tricky thing, particularly when you don't feel educated enough.  I have what I feel is only a basic grasp of grammar.  I'm unsure of my punctuation.  Punctuation is extremely important, too.  I struggle with it, to make sure the flow of words is as I meant it to be.  I remember someone I know illustrating this with a simple phrase, its meaning taken two completely different ways depending on the punctuation used.

The first way:
     "A woman without her man is nothing."
The second way:
     "A woman - without her, man is nothing."

Vastly different meanings, aren't they?  I'm not up for a debate on the political correctness of the phrase.  It's just an illustration of my point.  The sad thing is, as much as I fret about my grammar, punctuation and spelling, I see it as a dying art.  I'm a voracious reader, and I'm constantly seeing terrible mistakes in the books I read.  Books written by authors who've published dozens of books.  In one case an author I read has written two hundred books, and still her books are grammatically incorrect.  She admits to being a terrible speller, but where did her editors go?  How can they call themselves editors when even I know how many mistakes there are?

Someone once told me that publishers leave a couple of mistakes in on purpose for copyright reasons.  It makes it harder for someone to steal the work, or something.  I'm not sure whether or not I believe that, but even if it were true, they certainly wouldn't need more than two or three in a book, now would they?  A couple of errors in every chapter are a bit of overkill, aren’t they?

I spend a fair bit of time wondering how it is that I know the difference between to, two, and too, and yet most people don't seem to.  How hard would that have been for English teachers to properly explain to their students?  Okay, I get the inner city school issues of guns and the like, but it's absolutely the most basic knowledge of our language.  There, their and they're, are words that have very simple definitions regarding their appropriate use.  There is a place, their is possessive, they're is a contraction of they are.  A contraction is two words mashed together with an apostrophe in place of the missing letter or letters.  Sadly, a lot of people even put the apostrophe in the wrong place.  Every one of those errors could have been avoided with a simple definition and explanation by teachers.

There are confusion exceptions in the English language, and that's where I understand the errors people make.  They write in a way that seems logical.  We use an apostrophe 's' as possessive for almost everything except the word 'it'.  When we say, "A dog wags its tail," there should not be an apostrophe, however.  The reason for that is the contraction of 'it is' takes precedence.  It uses 'it's', and therefore, apparently to unsuccessfully avoid confusion, the possessive form of 'it' became 'its'.

These confusing exceptions are what make me feel inadequate regarding grammar and punctuation.  I will look things up if I don't know the answer, but even then I often have a hard time imprinting the information onto my brain.  It's like the old joke, "Why isn't phonetically spelled phonetically?"

Strangely, there was an error when I ran the spell-checker on this..  It told me to try again later.