Grammer

I have been known to blunder my way through the English Language. Being English is my first language, I don’t have the excuse for my solecisms that people who might be learning our language do.

I have caused much mayhem with editors who have accused me of doing it deliberately. Now with a computer program that frequently doesn’t catch all of them, I can write with passion and verve without causing an adult to fall into fits of anxiety and anguish. I haven’t broken the machine yet, But every day I seem to be striking out into new territory in abuse of a dumb machine.

Unlike a part-time human editor, the program can’t send me a passionate email describing how wonderful it feels not to endlessly try to reason with me over my love of the outre. Instead, I get comments from the program on my passive voice, poor use of ellipses, coma misplacement, overuse of the word “that,” strange grammatical constructions, slang, and obscure words not in the dictionary. It’s very liberating. I can tell the computer to go to perdition and not have it be offended.

This is wonderful as far as it goes, but something is missing when you can no longer feel the simmering heat of an offended English B.A. on the phone or receive the angry “You are F@#*ing impossible, I refuse to work with you again!” something is missing.

I think it’s that beautiful feeling of human contact that an emoji can’t replace.