Caught in a Floridian Web of sloppy writing

JUNE CASAGRANDE

America Online recently asked me to click a button to specify which

candidate I thought would be a better president. (I couldn’t find Pat

Buchanan’s name anywhere, so being the good Floridian I am, I

boycotted the polling.)

After the election, AOL asked me whether I thought George W. Bush

was an effective leader. The first time I ever encountered this brand

of cyber-interrogation was years ago, when the Los Angeles Times

briefly had its own online service. On the main page, a message

trying to draw kids to the children’s section asked, “Who’s better:

boys or girls?”

Does anyone else think there’s something odd about this? I mean,

besides the fact that everyone knows girls are better.

In none of these cases was there any indication that my answers

would be part of a survey or that they would be compiled or tallied

or published or reprinted anywhere. No one, as far as I could tell,

was actually doing anything with the answers. They were just giving

me an opportunity to “have my voice heard” -- by a machine that

couldn’t care less what I think.

All over the Internet, clever webmasters are sating peoples’

desire to be heard by offering opportunities for them to “talk to the

monitor.” So it’s not surprising that the World Wide Web is, in part,

a worldwide repository of solicited unwanted opinions, rants and, my

favorite, amateur film and television reviews. For those of you lucky

enough to have avoided these so far, apparently the country is full

of people so impressed by shows like “Two and a Half Men” that they

simply must tell the world.

Recently, as part of a freelance assignment, I had the unfortunate

experience of reading a few of these reviews. And what I learned may

surprise you: People who find it worthwhile to watch and write about

sitcoms tend to have a pretty bad grasp of the language and

communication in general.

Consider the following dazzling insights about Damon Wayans’ show,

“My Wife and Kids.”

“The show has a lot of good family values and its the one of the

shows you don’t wanna missed cause you’ll never know what to expect

and with this family anything goes.”

Now, when you’re frothing at the mouth to inform the public about

such urgent matters, it’s understandable that you might include a

typo such as “missed” instead of “miss.” But when 12 out of 14

reviewers all fail to understand the difference between “it’s” and

“its,” when no one seems to grasp the difference between “let’s” and

“lets,” when the average 500-word review contains only two or three

very, very long sentences, it’s clear that the language is going down

the commode, and fast.

Of course, a lot of these reviewers are very young. And it wasn’t

until I was a senior in college that a professor pointed out the

difference between “it’s” and “its.” (If you find this alarming, I

remind you: I’m from Florida.) “Its,” for those of you not yet

seniors in college, is an exception to the rule that you need an

apostrophe to form a possessive. If you were talking about a trained

chimp writing film reviews, you use an apostrophe for “the chimp’s

reviews” but not if you wrote “its reviews.” I suppose this exception

exists to distinguish “its” from “it’s.” The one with the apostrophe

is a contraction the words “it” and “is.”

“Let’s” and “lets” are a little more confusing. The one with the

apostrophe is also a contraction of two words, but these two words

form an expression we never use anymore: “let” and “us,” as in, “Let

us all vote Buchanan in 2008.” The one without the apostrophe is the

verb “to let” conjugated for the third person. “The chimp lets his

voice be heard.” “She lets readers see what a jerk she can be about

bad writing on the Internet.”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

[email protected].