In LA

I just re-read a blog post I wrote in 2007¹ and was enjoying the experience until I reached the last sentence and my brain’s language processing center misfired. I re-read the sentence. It was awkwardly-worded and contained more than one grammar mistake. I re-wrote the sentence in my mind and was about to edit the blog post when I realized that this would doom me a future of toil and ridicule.

I’m enough of a perfectionist that I know I would not be able to stop at correcting just the one post. I would have to spend hours or days going through the rest of the blog², correcting every grammatical flaw, every misstatement, every missing end tag. And when I’d finished the task, subtle errors would remain –errors of the sort that irritate people who possess stratospheric knowledge of the English language.

My blog’s current background level of grammatical error is probably high enough to keep those more sensitive eyes off the page for now, but if the error level were to be reduced the smug hordes could be here in seconds. And I am not ready! I have never read Strunk and White cover-to-cover, I’m not sure how to end a sentence without using a preposition or whether that’s even a guideline worth caring about, and most of my reading and writing for the past 10+ years has been tainted by the slapdash nature of its medium, the internet.

And then there’s the matter of whether or not editing an old blog post is a crime against the historical record³.

I’ve decided to avoid opening that box and risking that headache. Instead, I’m going to trot out the offending sentence into this public square and put it in the stocks. Here it is, from the blog post “finally heeding Bank of America’s call to go away“:

If you’re a former Versateller account holders who’s fed up with BOA’s lack of customer focus you might check it out –or if you’re eligible to join any local credit union those tend to be good too.

Oh what a crappy sentence. Let’s all share a laugh. Ha ha.

Technorati Tags: ego, embarrassment, grammatical error, insanity, persecution complex, blogging, ridicule, the sky is falling, waste of bandwidth, writing

1. A 2-year-old post is 40-years-old in internet years. [↩]
2. 409 posts in total, though a few of those are just images [↩]
3. Nevermind the fragility of the record; These posts could disappear forever if this laptop web server and my backups were to suddenly and simultaneously die. [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Amusing, Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.