As a quick follow-up to last week’s article about ‘Trigger Warnings,’ I understand that the people at Disney have decided that from today, before every TV showing of their classic Winnie The Pooh featurettes, there’ll be a ‘Tigger Warning’.
I suppose I should have included that little joke last week, but there’s a good reason why I didn’t.
I only thought of it last night.
I hope you appreciate I used the correct term ‘should have’ and not, as I increasingly hear and even see in print and online – ‘should of’, which is the sort of lazy use of language that sets my teeth on edge.
Not as much as they were last week when I overheard someone in the supermarket remark, “I says to him, I says, ‘Who does you think you is’?”
Why do so many people now say ‘should of’ when they wouldn’t have been taught that at school?
And they wouldn’t be saying it if they’d seen the term written in a book, magazine or newspaper, correctly spelt by someone with a knowledge of English grammar.
Well, you and I both know the answer to that.
There’s now a generation, maybe more than one, that get their views, news and opinions from social media, generated by people like them who are averse to picking up a book or newspaper.
So, it only takes one person to write, for example, “My boyfriend should of met me at six o’clock, but he was an hour late”, and their followers, and their followers’ followers will perpetuate the error.
Ah! I hear one or two of you ask, “In the grand scheme of things, is correct grammar important these days?”
I can best answer that by ending with a paragraph I’ve deliberately peppered with ‘bad grammar’.
Last week I artended a confrense of lokal bizziness peepill to disgust a bran knew skeem that ayms to cre-eight a fab’less leizure complecks that will evenchewally h’attract thousands of two wrists and boots the arias ekonomee.
If I wrote my articles that way every week, you’d all be running to the dentist with painful teeth!