Whether you believe that correct language shouldn’t be diluted and destroyed, or whether you think it’s quite OK to drop the vowels in all words because everyone can understand what you want to say, these photos will have you in splits. In a volatile political climate a new kind of fascism and an equally powerful resistance group has raised their banners. The new fascists are the Grammar Nazis – those that believe good grammar is sacred and correct spelling sacrosanct. They are the people who despise the use of truncations and consider errors of grammar, spelling and syntax as hanging offences.
Resistance is being offered by repeat offenders, who don’t know when to use their punctuation (or couldn’t care less), mess up spellings (supposedly deliberately because apparently d is cooler than the, lyk better than like and dis is apparently how this was meant to be spelt), can’t tell difference between you’re and your (gasp), use of apostrophes with a wanton and reckless disregard for public decency. Said offenders are also seen to use insane amounts of chatspeak (gr8, 2 instead of to, emoticons instead of words and so on).
Berlin’s Grammar Nazi Parade
So the upholders of grammatical morality decided that they had to make a stand of some sort, because according to them, “if the world wants progress then we need to be able to spell and structure sentences correctly”. A parade was organised to raise awareness of the clear and present danger of the situation; the very real apprehension that emoticons will completely replace the written word by 2050. Placards such as these were to be seen:
However a group of dyslexics decided to put up resistance to this new fascism and held up placards with “Yuor only jealus” and “Don’t mind the grammar Nazi’s, Their wrong” in defiance and provocation and had something like this to say:
Apparently it was all very civil; there was no violence or name calling… Refreshing! We could stand to see more such fascism and resistance around the internet wouldn’t we?
Author – Reena Daruwalla
