Call me a linguistic prescriptivist if you will, (although it's not as much fun as being a cunning linguist), but I CANNOT abide bad grammar, especially in public places. Now, being a Yorkshire(wo)man, I'm all for dialects and idiolects in spoken English, but in written English there has to be rules! Without rules there would be chaos!
I guess if you're reading this blog you've probably heard of Lynne Truss and her award-winning book, "Eats, shoots and leaves." Well, I read that book when I was at school and thought, "Wow, that is exactly how I feel!" Since then, I have felt my blood boil every time I see bad grammar. Cheesy slogans like "Jesus is you're friend!" written on a neon poster outside a church particularly grate on me. Jesus won't be your friend if you can't write properly! My inspiration for this blog, however, came to me recently while buying a train ticket from Harrogate to Leeds to get to university. The ticket machine had a note stuck on it saying, "Do not insert you're card if it is bent. It may not be returned." Excuse me?! I'm in Harrogate; you're supposed to be posh and well educated in Harrogate aren't you? I absolutely saw red. I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. Had anybody else noticed? Well, I look around sneakily, pulled a pen out of my bag and scribbled out the apostrophe and the 'e' at the end. Phew, that's better. I don't think anybody noticed but I felt very proud inside, walked off with my ticket and headed to my linguistics lecture.
