Posthuman Blues

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore

A new book has come out lambasting America's disintegrating understanding of basic English, and it's long overdue. You know what I'm talking about: People who don't know the difference between plurals and possessives -- or should I say, "plural's" and "possessive's"? People who show no overt signs of mental retardation but consistently use "there" when what they mean is "their" or "they're." Stuff like this really gets under my skin.

I walk into an Osco drugstore and I'm greeted by a bin of "BEANIE BABY'S." I regularly see high-cost signage above stores that dismisses the distinction between "its" and "it's." (Oddly, the trend is to use "it's" when what is intended is "its." You'd think it would be the other way around . . .) Sure, we all make typos in daily correspondence. Big deal. But how in the world does this shit get by corporations? A small sign in a retail franchise is bad enough, but when irresponsible use of kindergarten grammar infects major advertising campaigns I start wondering if there's some brain-numbing chemical in the air.

I'm always on the look-out for editing jobs because I like to think I'm reasonably competent. And I'm routinely told that companies "don't need" editors. Or proofreaders. Or apparently anyone who knows the basic mechanics of sentence structure. And they're ("there") right: Technically, they don't need them. But wouldn't it at least be nice to publish a newspaper/brochure/magazine that isn't littered with syntactic ignorance once in a while?