Having an unrelenting obsession with grammar serves no purpose but to stress you out and cause you to second-guess yourself. Language is an ever-evolving thing, not a static rulebook — which is why, after years of desperate attempts at grammatical perfection in my personal and professional life, I stopped trying to be grammatically correct and decided to let sleeping dogs lay.
I have never felt more liberated! :P
Now, instead of agonizing over weather it’s “your” or “you’re,” I just say “fuck it,” and that absolves me of having to chose one. Problem solved! But even if I was forced to pick one, it wouldn’t matter witch I went with, because grammar is entirely arbitrary. Like, even if this paragraph was riddled with grammatical errors, I’ve made my piece with that!
This mindset has been instrumental in helping me on my un-learning journey.
Although I’m as happy as a clam (metaphor alert!) about my decision to forgo grammar conventions entirely, I’ve kept quiet about it to my friends and family. You know what they say: don’t poke the bare.
I mean, I just know what they’d say! They’d be like, “Don’t you care about communicating clearly?” and “Doesn’t it bother you that people think you don’t know the difference between lay and lie?” and “For the last time, it’s ‘they’re’ not ‘there’!” I literally don’t even know what there talking about — sorry, their.
For me, it has never been about what I’m saying, but more about how I’m saying it. Yeah, maybe my emails are confusing because I never use apostrophes, or punctuation of any kind. Sure, it’s probably annoying to text me when I have auto-capitalization turned off on my phone. But, at the end of the day, while my emails may look unprofessional and are virtually indecipherable, they also say “I don’t care what you think,” and “What the fuck is a semicolon?” — and that’s exactly what I’m going for. It’s better than my boss ending her emails with an ellipsis, anyway. Whatever that is…
Ultimately, I’m not trying to bother my friends with my slouchy, error-ridden texts, or annoy my boss with my punctuation-less emails. Like I said before, I just want to let sleeping dogs lie. Wait, what did I say?
