Let’s talk about a pet peeve of mine today- crappy grammar & spelling.  I’m not so much of a Grammar Nazi that I don’t make my own mistakes, and I can overlook some stuff.  i h8 txt spk 2.  It drives me bonkers- I am one of those who types words out fully when I am sending text messages.   I do accept and understand that not everyone has a full keyboard or feels like typing stuff out on a phone, so that’s really no big deal.  Everything has a time and place, and if you’re going to use that kind of shorthand, well text messaging is exactly what it’s made for.

Then there’s Facebook.  I realize so many people update their status (statuses?  See, not perfect!) from their phones, and there’s also a character limit, so one has to accept a certain amount of internet shorthand and lack of punctuation and capitalization.  However, I really see no excuses for such poor spelling when using a computer to write even the simplest messages.  I use Firefox as my browser and every single word that is misspelled or needs to be capitalized has a squiggly red line under it.  It’s not like it’s hard to then right click and get the correct spelling.  Obviously this  doesn’t work for grammatical errors, because even if you use their/there/they’re wrong, if they’re spelled right, there is no notification.

With blogging, I don’t expect everyone to be a trained writer.  I know I’m not a professional author, and I started this blog for my own reasons, not to be critiqued and judged for my writing abilities.  I do want people to take me seriously though, especially when I’m representing a company through reviews and giveaways.  I want my posts to be easy to read, and free of most errors.  I want people to come back, not be turned off by my inability to spell and never return.  Typos happen.  I have probably spelled the as teh a million times.  My eyes skip right over those common errors that everybody makes.  But when someone continuously spells tomorrow as tommarow I want to beat them over the head with spell check.  In this day and age, there’s just no excuse for not using spell check.  Right?

So how many errors did I make in this post?

I have a few. Ok, I have a ton. Certain things just bug the crap out of me! I am sure I am not the only one who has them. These are in no particular order, obviously some are more petty than others LOL

• Bad spelling/grammar. I am not perfect, I know I’ve used words wrong and spelled them wrong as well, but come on, haven’t you heard of spell check?? I could make an entire post of just words and phrases that I see used wrong all the time, but I’ll spare you- and just leave you with one. Angle. As in, my baby is an angle in heaven. Drives me nuts.
• And of course the misuse of apostrophes. Drives me bonker’s to see thing’s like this. And the whole your/you’re mix ups you see everywhere. How hard it is to get that right?
• One uppers. This especially bothered me when Elora was born- everyone everywhere knew someone who had a smaller, sicker baby who lived in a shoebox on a radiator and did fine.
• Bad names. I can’t stand it when people name their children something horrible. I hate creative spellings (Nyckolle, Krystyl) or just plan made up names (Zavery, Maxigan), names that are items like alcohol (Tequila, Hennessy) or other items (Wesson), and those that sound like they fell off the pages of a cheesy romance novel (Amber Dawn, Ripley Stone, Thor Thunder) and apostrophes (J’Nette, Cam’ron). Names do not need apostrophes. I could go on but I don’t want to accidentally offend anyone.
• People who smoke while pregnant. I really am not a fan of smokers at all, in any circumstance, but to subject your fetus to that really chaps my hide.
• Text speak. I can’t stand when people use it all the time, in emails and whatnot. I won’t read it, and I automatically assume the person is uneducated. (txt spk. I cnt st& wen ppl uz it ll d tym, n Emsgs n whatnot. I won’t read it, +I automatically aSume d pRsN S uneduc8d.)
• People who haven’t walked in my shoes yet say that they know how I feel. Like… Oh I had a miscarriage, so I know how you feel about Elora dying. Or, my dog died, I know just what you’re going through. Yeah no. You don’t. You’re comparing two different things. Unless you’ve held your child in your arms and then had to turn her over to the nurse to bring to the morgue, you probably don’t have a clue, despite your best intentions.
• It also bothers me when people use just SOME of their kids names as their screen names. I suppose this makes me a bit hypocritical since this blog is named ‘TaterTwins’ but I did make it while I was pregnant, and it was just to be a pregnancy blog. But if you have three kids and your user name is just ‘JanesMom’ it bugs me. ESPECIALLY if it’s not even the oldest kid’s name that is used. I can see if it’s the oldest kid, because then it’s just a name they’ve used forever.
• I hate people that can’t control their kids and let them walk all over them and whine in public. I know all kids have their moments, but you know what I mean. I hate when parents let their children call all the shots. Step up and PARENT!
• I can’t stand when my fingernails have a jagged edge and get caught on stuff and I don’t have a pair of nail clippers with me to fix it.
• When someone is on their cell phone in a store, jabbering away, blocking the aisle with a cart, not paying attention to the world around them- that drives me crazy. You end up saying ‘excuse me’ thirty times and they never hear you.
• It makes me want to scream when I’m playing WoW and on vent and someone pronounces aggro like ‘are-go’. Hello, phonics!

So what are your pet peeves?

ETA: I have another one. Bullets that overlap with your images.