Written by El Guapo | 13 August 2010

“Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dick or nothin', but, ah... it says on your chart that you're fucked up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded. What I'd do, is just like... like... you know, like, you know what I mean, like...”

And so goes one of my favorite quotes on one of my favorite movies in cinematic history. Idiocracy.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, the basic premise is that if society continues taking the easy way out of everything, mankind will be comprised of a bunch of retards in the not so distant future.

I used to spend more time on Facebook than I do these days. I used to communicate with people I went to High School or College with. I had a bunch of friends, and then I realized that my real friends were the ones I kept in touch via phone or email anyway. So, I deleted a bunch of people and kept a select few as my friends. But even this select crowd is starting to get on my nerves on account of the people they befriend.

Few things bother me more than bad grammar, and I am by no means a scholar when it comes to the proper usage of the English Language; I just don’t commit the grammatical atrocities that most people these days do. My friends are friends with a bunch of people who cannot write proper English. Perhaps the fact that it is not my native language has given me a keen eye to spot these deficiencies, but I think the problem is getting out of hand and it is starting to affect my ability to understand what people try to convey to me in writing.

Let me illustrate this with some real-life examples of stuff I have seen written on Facebook:

1.- “Joe, you’re sense of humor still goes unparalleled.”
There are people out there, comedians by trade, who live and breathe humor; these people believe in total immersion in order to develop their funny skills. Perhaps our friend was trying to share with the rest of us that Joe indeed lives and breathes sense of humor to the point where he has become that very concept.  “Joe, you are sense of humor, and it still goes unparalleled” would have been a much better way to phrase the above idea. I am not going to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, because anyone that uses unparalleled in a sentence should be literate enough to understand the difference between you’re and your.

2. “Your the man!”
I thought slavery had been abolished back in 1863. This, however, is a statement that celebrates someone owning a man, and not just any man: THE man. It is unclear, however, if we are supposed to celebrate the fact that THE man is owned, or the fact that your man is THE man. We need some clarification here! Something to the effect of “Your the man changed my flat tire in no time!” or “Your the man can cook as well as he can pick cotton: quickly, efficiently, and without breaking a sweat!”

3. “The Seahawks are losing again, I wonder why they can’t get there heads out of there asses”
This statement is so deep that it is almost metaphysical. The Seahawks are apparently losing because they took the heads of some people there and put them up the asses of some people over there. I am speechless, what can I say, this is a brand new concept for me. I am used to teams losing because the players have their heads up their own asses, but never because they have taken someone else’s head and stuck it someone else’s ass. Does this mean that in addition to being losers, they do not take accountability for their losses?

4. “Your a really descent guy, their lucky to have you on there side.”

The first question that comes to mind is what, or where, is this guy descended from? This is another case of ownership, but it is not necessarily celebrated. Luck is on their side, obviously, but the side that is there is also with them. This one confused the hell out of me. I have nothing more to say about this one.

And the piéce de resistance:

5. “Next year look out for stanton hes gunna put up ridicoulus numbers i guarantee.”
I will make no comment about that one, I think it speaks for itself.

In my line of work, I come across a lot of these grammatical atrocities. Sometimes I am called The Grammar Nazi, others I am just called a snob because I use words that apparently no one else uses. Once I told my employees that unless they did something egregious, they would not be fired. They stared at me, with the deer-in-the-headlights look until I explained what egregious means.

I am sure that behind my back they probably mock me because I “sound like a fag”, to use that quote from Idiocracy. But the problem is real, and we need to help our fellow man out. We write and we read; we are clearly not the knuckle-draggers of society. I think it is our social obligation to shame these people into good grammar and good spelling. We need to start a movement to unfriend everyone who is friends with someone who commits a grammatical atrocity. Let’s expose these people and help purge society of these viruses who are killing our language slowly but surely.

We can call it the Movement to Purify English and our acronym can be MOPE.

Oh, wait, we already do that…crap!