Grammar-nazi

This is for the Finns out there, but it's in English so others can understand my rant as well.

I always thought that my language-skills (in Finnish that is) are nothing extraordinary. I do make occasional typo and some other random errors, but usually my text is correct. And, IMO, that should be the default. OK text that is not painful to read. If you can write beautiful text, great! But at least don't write crappy text.

But as I thought that I'm more or less average in this area, it's starting to seem like I'm in the top 5% or something. Not because I'm great, but because there's metric assload of people who's text is downright atrocious. I just read a piece of text in an online messageboard. The text consisted of seven sentences, and in that space the person who wrote the text had managed to squeeze in EIGHT grammatical-errors and/or typos! Come ON! And that's not really uncommon.

The one thing that seems to be causing people problems are compounds. Why? They are not THAT hard! But people still make loads of errors with them. "tietokone" turns in to "tieto kone". Goddamit people, get a grip! Were you asleep during your Finnish-classes or something?

If we wish to communicate with others in a civilized manner, we need to master the language. No, something that kinda resembles correct grammar and spelling does not cut it! And it's not like you are asked to do differential algebra in your head, you are just asked to write correct Finnish. You know, the language you hear everywhere around you, the language you think in, the language you read every day? Is it REALLY that hard?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The world is like that now. Soon, perfectly spelt words and immaculately constructed sentences will be like gold and I will be rich.