Mr Dark Side

While I like to live positively, even in the most miserable of situations, there are always things that irritate you so much you feel the need to either a) swear loudly, or b) shake things vigorously. Here are just a couple of my biggest pet peeves:

Poor Spelling and Grammar

I’m not perfect. I’ll happily admit that. No-one is perfect, and anyone who thinks they are perfect is too arrogant for me to waste my time on. Now, I know there are people out there who will read this and pick out every error I make. However, I do feel in this day and age that there are people out there who have no excuse for their lack of grammatical intelligence and blindness to spelling mistakes. Two of my top gripes in the abuse of the English language are:

a) Saying “should of” when the correct term is “should have”. It always has been, and always will be. www.dictionary.com actually addresses this error when searching for the definition of the word “of”:

—Pronunciation note
Because the preposition of, when unstressed (a piece of cake), and the unstressed or contracted auxiliary verb have (could have gone, could've gone) are both pronounced /əv/ Show Spelled[uhv] Show IPA or /ə/[uh] in connected speech, inexperienced writers commonly confuse the two words, spelling have as of (I would of handed in my book report, but the dog ate it). Professional writers have been able to exploit this spelling deliberately, especially in fiction, to help represent the speech of the uneducated: If he could of went home, he would of.

b) When there, their and there are used interchangeably. This is basic ignorance and neglect of your primary education people. I remember learning the rules for these words when I was about 6 years old. 18 years on, and I’m still able to remember it. Of the 375 million people in the world who speak English as their first language, surely I am not the only person who was taught this rule at an early age.

I’m not going to pretend that I remember everything I learned at school. This is mainly because the things I have forgotten are as a result of not needing to use that knowledge. However, I speak every day, I write every day and I type every day. This is what my education was for, to ensure I don’t come across as a total moron in my adult life. I have no idea what everyone else thought they were at school for.

Uncontrollable Children

Now, I may offend people here, but quite frankly, I don’t care.

It’s not that I don’t like children, I like some kids. Usually when they are occupied, or engaged in an activity, like they should be. However, I find more and more people incapable of ensuring their children are not bored and seem to think the best option is to let them get in the way of me enjoying my life. An example of such an incident is:

Food Shopping. I like my weekly food shop. I like to plan my week, figure out what lovely meals I’m going to cook, decide if I can afford to cook for friends, or eat out one night. What I don’t like is hearing bratty children demanding ice cream, screaming when they don’t get a response, or get the “wrong” response. As a child, I wouldn’t have dared act like that in a public place, mainly for fear of what might happen to me when I got home, and also because I didn’t have a need to act like that. My mum would keep me occupied by letting me read the list out, or pick the items from the lower shelves, or even the promise of popping to the park over the road afterwards. It’s not difficult, all kids want is to be involved in the activity that the grown ups are doing.

There are lots of other things that get my goat, but those are my main gripes with society today. A few other things on my “dislike” list are Marmite, bones in my fish, heartburn, soaps (on TV, not the cleansing bars) and soggy jeans.