Your You’re Own Worst Enemy

Dear Grammatically Challenged Ones, 

While those close to me know I have many gripes about the mistreatment of our fine language, I will try to stick to just this one because I know you will struggle to keep up if I say too many things all at once. I will ignore for now the fact that you have not yet worked out when to use there, their or they’re, or then and than, or affected or effected and the list goes on. Your use and misuse of the words your, you’re and ur is the error that is bothering me the most. It’s not difficult, so please try not to zone out and rock back and forth like that. Here is a guide to not being an idiot:

“Your” is the possessive form of the word you, as in “your mama”.

“You’re” is a handy truncation of “you” and “are”. It’s got this great thing that you probably can’t actually say let alone use, called an apostrophe, so you save on saying one syllable or writing one letter, as in “you’re challenged”. Which you are.

“Ur” is an abbreviation of both to be used only in the medium of TXT. The only reason this is acceptable is that the overuse of characters will result in an increased cost to the sender and the normal rules around not communicating like an imbecile do not apply. Twitter statûs are also an acceptable place for “ur” to be used, but only when it is required to stay within the dictatorial 160 character limit. 

For longer forms of writing including Facebook statûs, Facebook wall posts, Facebook private messages, Facebook comments and amazingly non-Facebook-based text (if such a thing still exists) is it so difficult to apply the correct term?

Four my own interest I tried to right like ewe, butt it was a miss take and than it made my head hurt fore daze. Unfortunately what makes our tongue so great is its flexibility and adaptability. It is a living thing, but unfortunately this is also its downfall, as the lowest common denominator, in this case you, are reducing our written language to a series of phonetic abbreviations and emoticons and our spoken language into grunts and heavy breathing. 

Now I know I sound like a pedant, which is fair, as I am, but if you don’t show words some effing respect, in time we may all be reduced to communicating as you do, and that would spell (correctly) the end of humanity, I’m sure of it. I would like to suggest an alternative. I propose you and your brethren go far, far away, preferably to non-valuable, non-arable lands where you will be free to scratch grammatically poor sentences in the dirt and pick fleas off one another. The kicker will be that from your new reservation my gauntlet, containing none to very few errors, may not be able to reach you there. 

Oh, and it’s “would have” NOT “would of”!

Kyrani