Troy's Rants and Ravings

So!!

Having weathered a storm of protests and “factual corrections” by my oldest son and the elder Brother-in Law, Colin, who, bless their little hearts, are attempting to dissuade me from my grammatically challenged path to self destruction, please allow me to respond to the slings and arrows of my kinsmen:

Firstly, as my son so eloquently writes:

Unfortunately, dear Father, you are on the wrong side of the grammatical fence – as it were – of this particular matter.

Here we see that my beloved oldest son (from now on referred to as The Boy…) has, in his utter rush to confound and flummox his father, mixed his Tenses. By mixing the words “are” and “this” he presents himself in the present and then for overly dramatic effect tosses a live grenade in his own argument by saying “as it were” which, unless my last remaining idling brain cell, has taken leave, puts his statement in the past… I hereby formally POOH POOH his above statement and stand by my own recent claim of grammatical superiority.

After this faus pax, he then decides that, since he has blown himself clear of his own foxhole, a reference work that defends his own erroneous viewpoint should be used to validate his “New Age” thinking:

According to the definitive technical writing text The Elements of Style , by which you and I – people of the technical professions – should adhere to most stringently, “The pronominal possessives hers, its, theirs, yours, and oneself have no apostrophe.”* Strunk and Wagner are without question the most quite authoritative with respect to the common English utilized in our respective industries in Modern America. And I’m afraid we have to just deal with it.

Dear God in Heaven!!! The above sentence is worthy of the nonsensical ravings of a particular beauty queen. To wit:

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.”- Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA

He closes his faltering grammatical attack on my person with an olive branch:

The world is never fair to men of culture.

And then, to top it all off, he realizes that the genetic flaws that run in the male side of Clan Donson have reared their ugly heads and bitten him right in the ass!! The most famous and most often used words in Clan Donson when something goes awry are “oh no… oh NO!!!”

His next missive sent exactly one minute later states:

Oh dear, please eliminate “quite” from that post. Thank you good sir.

Ahhhh!!!! Vindication that The Boy has his own weak moments and errors to deal with. Also, I may point out that in the above 4 word sentence that The Boy left out a comma. It should be Thank you, good sir.

And as an additional peppering, allow me to ask if The Boy also uses the terms CE and BCE when speaking of dates? For this, too, is the “new” way to conduct ourselves in this, the Politically and Grammatically Correct “Modern Age”…

First off I reject the idea of Modern America as this is becoming a time of irresponsibility.

Check any newspaper for clarification that the country has lost it’s ability to be the successor of it’s previous generation. In other words, we used to do what was right and not worry about what the rest of the world thought. For example:

We spell it color, not colour.

It’s tire, not tyre.

It’s “Open the hood and I’ll take a look…” not “Pop the bonnet and we’ll have a glance at it, then, wot?”

You put the spare tire in the trunk, not in “the boot”, damnit!

Politically it’s like this:

Capital Punishment is a Good Thing.

It is and has always been about illegal immigration and NOT immigrant rights, undocumented workers, racism, racial profiling or any of the other garbage. The term illegal says it all. I do not condone special treatment for rapists, murderers, thieves or white collar crooks, so why should illegal aliens get any special treatment or rights that we do not get when invading their country??

Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams et al repeatedly stated “The only defense against a tyrannical government is an armed populace.” Thus the Peoples’ Right to bear arms against any foe, foreign or domestic…

My apologies… I started to run afield of my ranting at my imagined slight, courtesy of The Boy…

So, before I lose track of where I am and what I am doing there, allow me to quote from a good friend who has recently received his Doctorate in Linguistics from UCSD:

“And, for the history buffs in the audience, let me point out that its is a somewhat recent addition to the language. Its earliest written citation in the OED is 1598, although it was apparently in use colloquially before then. In fact, through the 19th century, it’s and its were in competition to be the possessive form of it, and it looks like it’s was more popular in the 17th century. So it isn’t obvious that its should be the possessive pronoun…”

So, as I admit this is a terribly rambling refuting of his attempts to undermine my vastly superior grammatical skills, I once again assert my own dominance in the world of the written word.

As for Colin, please, sir, be aware that the salvos you send my way will be returned in kind, but not in the same genre as what I receive.

Let it be known that your sister holds the secret of your childhood endeavors to blame rude noises on innocent inanimate objects rather than take the blame yourself…

And thus I retake the crown of Language Superiority back from the usurpers…

Troy Ok, So I'm an Idiot...