Call me old fashioned but I'm a stickler for good spelling and proper use of language. I was a copy editor for years and old habits are hard to break.
It's ancient history, of course, that the blogging/texting/Twitter generation don't care to be bogged down by such petty concerns. They need to get their messages out tout suite, and if that means a their instead of they're, or a your instead of you're, or a then instead of a than—you know, whatevs, who cares? Only old people, right? Not to mention the whole "leetspeak" culture popularized sometime last century by gamers along with texting abbreviations that even the mombloggers use now, like ur and LOL and pwn and srsly.
But every so often, on a blog or in a forum or among some comments or other, I come across the casual flaying of an extremely common word or phrase that is just too egregious to ignore. Like per say. Which, I guess, is a little like here say. Or low and behold. That's a good one. Because, you know, when you wish to draw extra attention to a certain fact or observation, you shall gaze upon it and low like a cow. Lo and behold is such an archaic expression, it really doesn't belong in the realm of casual online conversation at all. Why is anyone under 85 saying it? Yet I see it all the time.
Another one I see constantly, and have done for years, is all of the sudden. Not all of just any sudden, you see—it's got to be all of a very specific sudden. I mean, sheesh! Whoever uses this phrase probably should have stuck to using suddenly in the first place.
Like Cindy Sherman. Unbelievably, I saw this error very recently in old media. New York magazine, to be exact, in the cover story My First New York. I was curious to know all about Ms Sherman's first impressions of New York City back in the day, so I settled in to read. Here's what I saw:
It was the summer of 1977, and I was terrified of the city. The Son of Sam was going around murdering couples, the city blacked out for 24 hours, the transit strike stopped all the buses, and all of the sudden women who used to wear little pumps to work now started wearing sneakers. I don’t remember leaving the apartment much. I was just like, “Oh my God, here I am in the city!”
This is forgivable when a random blogger or commenter commits this kind of language abuse. A mature, celebrated artist? Well, maybe Cindy's more of a visual person. And that's okay. But New York? I'm sure everyone there is overworked and stressed out there, like anyone in the dismal world of magazine publishing right now, but this is, in my view, super sloppy. New York, you are not just a blog yet. Bad New York!
Consider this the first part of an occasional series. I'll be watching...
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