Grammar Slut

I heart Chelsea Summers. Her blog has always been one of the most literate web sites to deal with sex in the whole blogosphere, and she has just enough misanthropy that she has long since secured herself a place in the black, shriveled lump of muscle that is my heart. But she’s outdone herself with her two most recent entries. She’s started writing about one of the kinks that rules all my other kinks: Grammar.¹

Stupid people don’t interest me, sexually or otherwise, and yes, just because you make grammatical or spelling mistakes doesn’t make you stupid. But you come off as a lot smarter if you can at least make a fucking effort, and let’s face it — you give some people a computer keyboard, and they just don’t seem to give a shit what comes out on the screen. Much as I love the Internet and all the geeky toys and perverted communities it makes available to me, it’s also an excruciating experience reading a lot of Internet prose, which is apparently written by people who surrendered all responsibility for correct language and style to a third-rate spellchecking program before they sent that part of their brain out to the dry cleaner’s and then promptly dropped the claim check behind the couch where it lay mouldering for eight months before being picked up by a rat to use as home improvement materials.

I’m kinda unreasonable on this point, actually. I admit it. People who don’t know the difference between its and it’s² or who consistently confuse they’re with their kinda piss me off. Having stuff like that scattered through an otherwise stimulating piece of writing is like tooling down an open stretch of Route 66 in a souped-up convertible with the wind in your hair and smashing into speed bumps every half-mile or so until your transmission is trailing behind you. It’s disruptive to the experience of reading, and even more so when you’re writing about sex. Bad grammar just isn’t sexy. I’m amazed by the number of people in chatrooms and on Craig’s List who think that nothing is more likely to get them laid than displaying their command of leetspeak.

So, as mundane as it seems, Chelsea’s posts on grammar make me tingle in all the right places. I’ve always thought Chelsea was hot, but these posts make her seem so much hotter. A lot of grammar instruction completely misses the point, and sucks all the sensuality out of language, leaving a pile of ashes behind. I remember that intimately from all my English classes in grade school. I’d been reading voraciously almost since before I was able to hold a book upright by myself, and so many of my teachers came close to making me regret ever having learned the alphabet as they hammered rules about predicates, gerunds, active and passive tense into my head. Language, in my classes, became the servant of theory rather than vice-versa. Language is much better served by the wit and sauciness and love that Chelsea imbues it with in her articles. On the topic of one of my favorite punctuation marks, the humble and oft-neglected semi-colon, she says this:

Learning to use semi-colons is like learning to love anal. Once you get over the comfort zone, you’ll wonder why you never did it before. And like anal, you don’t want to be judicious in your practice. Too much and you’ll kind of spoil the joy, but only you know how much is too much.

How could anyone not want to know more about semi-colons after reading that? Speaking for myself, semi-colons have served me well over the years. That paragraph makes me think I should be practicing more with anal play, if it’s really as good as semi-colons.

1. Please note the proper use of our friend the colon at the end of this sentence, which is covered in explicit detail by Chelsea in her second post about perverted grammar. ↩

2. For the proper answer to the this one, I typically direct people to Steven Notley’s cartoon Bob the Angry Flower’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, YOU IDIOTS. It combines clarity, humor and misanthropy into one truly classic and useful strip. If you can’t figure out the proper usage of the apostrophe after being belittled by a pissed-off flower, there really is no hope for you. ↩