Yesterday, I was surfing the net and read the following two posts
*koolgrrrl on the grammy's
*neal pollack's guide to the grammy's (an ode to hipsterlogs)
(which I found on lindsayism) Anyway, I had a good laugh at the parodying of crapass spelling and creative punctuation practiced by various bloggers. It was a nice laugh at ‘their’ expense. Until….I found this old post of mine. And suddenly, it all became clear, they were making fun of ME. (Not me personally, but I was guilty of the crime they were mocking. Like how a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square, me being the square, Pollack and kook grrrl making fun of the rectangle).

Since defensiveness has been bred into my very bones, I immediately began thinking of reasons for such grammatical slaughter and the best I could come up with is….do you remember when you were growing up and you would get in trouble for saying a bad word. No? Well, my mother was the Commissioner of the Bad Word Police. I would get soap in my mouth for saying the ‘f’ word. Fart, that is, not f*ck. Anyway, somewhere around the age of 10 or 11 or 12 (okay, fine, 16), I realized that my mother did not, actually, have a microphone following me around all day and thus I was free to spew forth all the words I could ever dream of spewing. F-words, s-words, c-words, F-u-c words. It was heaven. For me. I’m sure it was irritating as shit for my friends. But I, my dears, was liberated.

Cut to the blogger revolution, when anyone, and that, unfortunately does mean anyone, can write and PUBLISH FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION anything his or her little heart desires. With no copyediting required. And I was once again drunk with freedom. So I went a little crazy here and there. (We all remember the prolly stage). I thought I would imply large thoughts by adding extra letters to words (hot would become hott if the person or idea so merited (spelling I totally borrowed from brooke)), fun would become funn if it was, you know, extra funn. And freunds. I have no excuse for that one. I just like the sound of the word.

But, as with all drugs in the world, eventually you tire of them and the further use of them leads to ennui. In short, they become a crutch. And then, a hindrance. So I slowly moved back to normal spelling. And pretty normal grammar. Reduced the exclamation points. I still punctuate for emphasis and will never get the whole capitalization thing consistent. (Hey, if the founding fathers didn’t have to, why do I?)

Anyway, go ahead and mock me. What can I say, but that I was young and testing my boundaries. Boundaries marked. Moving on….