"are you NUMERATE, babe?"

my first familiarity with the emphasized title term was from a tim curry song back in 1979. (off the "fearless" album, you know, the one with "i do the rock"?). the emphasis is tim's btw...

anyway, i've been running around a writing website recently and discovering the same sort of personal horror i feel when i see kids trying to make change at mcdonalds. (repeat after me: take the total sale and start counting UP with the change until it matches what the customer is trying to hand you). they've chosen to use language as a means of expression, just like those erstwhile mcdonald's "would you like to have fries with that" folks are choosing to work in an environment where change inevitably needs to be made, yet they're seemingly wholly unprepared to operate the machinery involved. i'd like to believe, if osha protected apostrophe's from misuse as diligently as they require hard hats on construction sites, something like this would never be allowed to happen. oh well, apparently it has.

perhaps, as one of these "riters" would put it, gertrude stein would have said, about this as well as trying to return to her childhood home, that "they'res no their there". (and, yes, i put the closing punctuation outside the quotation marks when it's also part of my enveloping sentence, not to mention the upcoming closing parend, so you can just sue me for hypocrisy later). instead there are apologists decrying the stifling of all this artistic creativity (you tell me, i hadn't been able to see it through the quasi-illiteracy) and suggesting sticklers are the problem for having the temerity to try to defend language at the expense of its use. which, to me, is like complaining about the aclu when the cause defended to the supreme court doesn't happen to be your own (yes, this is a sentence fragment and the parentheses surrounding this observation lack cossetting commas) but i digress.

pointing out mistakes in grammar, spelling and punctuation absolutely distracts from what is otherwise attempted to be expressed. (just think how frustrated you are to have to climb over my own editorial digressions while trying to read this). but, at some point, it's fair to point out to someone when they've screwed up what they're trying to say, just the same way we feel compelled to correct the cashier at the fast food joint. (at least when the mistake being made isn't in our favor, but conditional morality is the subject of the other posts, not this one).

so don't mind me if i find it funny that a sixty-ish mother hen has become offended at the way i barged into HER web site to point out that folks just can't seem to communicate these days. (funniest part is that her reading comprehension is so poor that she mistook a phrase like "tragically under-circulated" to suggest i didn't believe the author was, well, tragically under-circulated, but that's a whole 'nuther kettle of codfish).

so, are you LITERATE, babe?

are you NUMERATE, babe?

do you get laid, babe?

(OOPS! that's a little off-topic, isn't it...)

but i'm on a lyrical mission to get ALLLLL the way to the end (don't miss it because it's during the very tail end of the fade-out) so i could enjoy the final line:

"there's a serious problem in personnel"