You ever know someone who just can't say a word the right way? Maybe they think there's an X in especially or forget how many Rs there are in library, or just can't remember how to use their punctuations correctly. There is, of course, a modern term for people who go around calling others out on their minor errors which do not actually affect communication in any way - Grammar Nazis.
The thing is, we all do this a little bit, even though we're well aware it's a dumb thing to do. You know where we don't realize that? When we're dealing with a slightly different culture.
Words are different in different parts of the country. Down here in the south, for example, we commonly refer to the lights that hang over the roads and tell traffic whether to go or not as red lights, regardless of what color they are at a given moment. This caused some confusion a few years back when we were giving directions to some family from Michigan. "Wait, you want us to drive through the red light? Isn't that illegal?" That's because they call them traffic lights. We had similar trouble driving around up there, where street signs mentioned that you could only turn from the center lane. On a 7-lane highway, it took us a few missed turns before we realized that they meant what we call the turn lane. This is the stuff mildly amusing family anecdotes are made of.
Once you get past that, though, it stops being so amusing and starts getting unnerving. Did you know that Wikipedia has been edited 11,751 times over the spelling of Brazil? They spell it Brasil there. And someone has "corrected" the entry over ten thousand times changing an inconsequential detail that doesn't really have a "right" answer. Source
That source page has lots of examples of time being wasted over the tiniest of details, but it gets worse when we start drawing the lines and pitching the tents over similarly meaningless details.
This is Sean Lock. He's a British comedian, something you may remember I'm quite fond of. He has a joke about how British English is being corrupted by American English, in the form of people going into a Starbucks and saying "Can I get a cup of coffee?" instead of the 'correct' "Can I have a cup of coffee?" I get that it's a joke. I'm not complaining that he did a joke I don't like. I'm concerned that the reason that joke works so well is because people think he's right. People think there's a real and valuable thing to protect there. We use different words in the same language in America than they use in Britain, or Australia, or other places. But they're different. It doesn't mean one of us is wrong and really needs to change to the other way. It certainly doesn't mean we need to be prepared to wage passive-aggressive insult wars with everyone who's different. Go read a YouTube comments page and count how many arguments start over someone saying something perfectly reasonable but with a misspelled word. Watch how nasty it gets from there.
There's too much hate in the world. People used to pick up guns and go to war over who owned which patch of land. It's less violent, but just as destructive to have people pick up insults and hurl them back and forth over who can't speak the one true language properly. It's so common, so brutish, and so accepted. You don't usually get those three adjectives on the same topic.
I don't know what the solution is here. Why are people in different parts of the country, or different countries, ready to divide and conquer over the right word? Why, if not that, are they willing to spend hour after hour mercilessly editing and re-editing to make sure their version is the final version? It is dividing us into antisocial, mental fortress-bugs as much as social movers once feared. Why do we want to pull away from each other? Why will take any excuse, no matter how small, to cut each other apart from ourselves?
If you know, make sure you spell the answer correctly.
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