Who knew grammar was a fandom?

[nonelvis]

I could have lived without the ableist insults, but the rest of this secret gets a big, fat HELL, YES from me. (Note that this is not my secret, but the original, TB!4 in this post, was too hard to read even at 100%, so I enlarged it.)

ETA: I should have added that the language used is NSFW, and that some people may find it offensive.

Comments

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

Luckily I don't drive, so this has never been an issue for me. But proper names are different in any case, and I'll bet it was spelled that way to save space on the sign.

nonelvis will probably remember this: On one of the other boards we belong to, there was a woman (Lola? Lolita?) who used to write "site" and "lite" and "thru" and shit like that, and it drove everyone on the board crazy. No matter how many times she was corrected and asked not to do it, she would keep it up. She claimed they were accepted spellings because she had seen them in print. Eventually the boardrunner wrote a script so that every time she used one of those words, they would be replaced with "It's spelled L-I-G-H-T, Lola. LIGHT not LITE!" (depending on the word she used, of course).

I think she got banned eventually.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

Things like "lite" came into the language as an effort to trademark them -- you can't trademark an actual common word. So we get LiteBrite or Lite Beer, which Miller Brewing trademarked.

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but she was claiming that they were OK to use in everyday English. It drove people NUTS.

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but she was claiming that they were OK to use in everyday English, because it was an "alternate" spelling.

(I don't know about in the US, but in Canada, the food industry is only allowed to use the word "Light" if the product is significantly lower in calories or fat than the original product. Companies get around that by using "Lite" instead.)

[nonelvis]

Lola! She was awful, and she did get the well-deserved banhammer.

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

She got banned for stuff other than her appalling spelling, but I think that was icing on the cake.

[alphabetically.livejournal.com]

I had forgotten about that! HA. That was hilarious.

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

Hey! It's you! I am totally friending the hell out of you right now, if you don't mind!

(I'm Heather C on TUS, in case it wasn't obvious)

[alphabetically.livejournal.com]

It wasn't! I looked at your profile to see if I could tell, and sadly I could not. Thanks for letting me know!

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

I used to have another icon as my default, and I think it's the same one I used to use on TUS. But I have run out of room for icons, so I deleted it from my list. I will probably bring it back into rotation later.