Complaining About Poor Grammar On Facebook

Apparently 573,561 people “like” the page “The correct usage of "You're", "Your", "There", "Their" and "They're”" on Facebook.

While I am all for a dialogue that encourages a better understanding of our language, I don’t think the stylistically relaxed and informal setting of social networking sites and text messages are the appropriate places to preach about word usage or apostrophes.  If you got frustrated with every person who used poor grammar on the internet, you’d lose your mind…really, this is Facebook: not a cover letter for your dream job or a college dissertation. Congratulations on your confidence in a few basic grammatical fundamentals but let’s not get carried away criticizing people or bragging. I know, it's hard for me to believe too, but there are still people in the world who not have learned English as their first language or, even more shocking, are actually less intelligent than you. Unfortunately, most of the people who fall into that category spent their school years in special education classes or were born addicted to crack; still, I will try not to rain too much on your parade.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to grow up in this country with a (mostly) functioning mind and receive the benefits of our country’s mediocre educational system will remember that underpaid teachers had been begging us to learn when to use "then" and "than" and what an apostrophe means since we were in first grade. The fact that, at the ripe old age of 25, you finally picked a few of those not-very-complicated nuances doesn’t mean you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize – it means you need to get a real job or take a few more classes at community college and expand your greatest academic achievement a bit.