You Are Not The English Police

Hear me out. We should all presume good intent, but sometimes there are moments when it just crosses the line and we just want to be able to do what we want. As a writer, I like to ensure what I’m saying makes sense and always check my spelling and grammar before publishing. However, mistakes are still inevitable, and sometimes I don’t always catch them right away. Not just in chapters of a story or articles on a blog, but even if I’m chatting in a Discord server.

Ross, shut up, no mansplaining, please. I think this is one reason why I couldn’t get into this series. I’m saddened over the fact that at work, certain things we use, have been named after this couple, which I’ve heard is quite toxic.

Anyway, what infuriates me when someone tries to correct a mistake I made and I don’t even know them. I mean, I’ve seen memes where people get upset when someone types “your” when in reality, “you’re” is what they are supposed to say in context with the sentence. As annoying as that can be, is it your duty to correct a stranger on the Internet who made a typo? No, it isn’t, no matter what their intentions were.

Maybe it was a genuine mistake, maybe English isn’t their first language, or when typing with your smartphone, typos are very common if you’ve turned off autocorrect. Regardless, mistakes happen, and we shouldn’t rebuke and correct people for them.

Some people often take it too far, like one time I was in the BioWare Discord server talking with other users over which companions in the new Dragon Age game they would like to romance. I was leaning toward Lucanis the Mage Killer as I thought he was quite handsome from the very first footage I saw of him.

On the server, I saw that I wasn’t the only one who was interested in him and there were a few things that I believe contributed to what happened next. Members were sending replies like wildfire and the mods had implemented a cooldown but only for thirty seconds. But while I had to wait to say something next, other people were still posting, which made anything I put up previously get lost in the thread while I was waiting for the countdown to hit zero. When I finally had a turn to post again, I typed the following quickly.

I just want to run my fingers through Lucanis’s hair!

Now, you know that there is a grammar error there, I’m sure I’m not the only one to make this mistake, adding an extra “s” after the apostrophe for a word/name that ends with an “s” it was an honest mistake, but in the heat of the moment where I was fangirling along with some other members, I didn’t notice when I was typing and after I pressed enter so I let it slide.

But then, a user who has now been blocked, decided to become the English police and reply to me the following.

As an English major you should go to jail.

I immediately took offence to this. Why is it that people feel like they need to police other people’s writing when a writing error is made? Having an English major does not make you superior to other people when it comes to writing in general. Also, I should go to jail? Fuck. Off. It was an honest mistake. Typos happen and do I really need to be reprimanded for it? There is no jail for making spelling and grammar errors, if you think that’s funny, it definitely is not.

I’m not saying that everyone with an English major does this, (what can you even do with that other than teach the subject anyway?) but even those without one may also behave like this online and I hate it. I’m not in school anymore, so leave me alone. I stood my ground and said I didn’t find the joke appropriate, and then they replied with a gif that I could not see other than the link because the server has not enabled that feature for anyone. I told them to back off, and they said to stop validating their existence or something like that, and that led to me blocking them.

I know, I know, the safest thing to do is ignore these pyjaks. I’m a slow learner. But still, I am calling this out because I feel it was disrespectful and people should know about it as that’s what I do on this blog, pointing out injustices when I am not rambling about dreams, games, music, books, and attractive fictional characters.

I mean, how would you feel if someone said you should be put behind bars for making a simple English error that anyone else could have made? Or, what if, you forgot to alt-text your post with images on a place like Mastodon and some stranger lectures you for that? I swear, I love it there, but some people on there are so strict that they will not engage with anyone who does not alt-text images. I get it, it’s important to do so for those who might have a slow connection where images don’t load as quickly or they are visually impaired, but we are human beings and if we forget to add alt-text or make a typo, it doesn’t mean we’re bad people. Again, mistakes happen, I don’t think a lot of us like being told what to do on the Internet by strangers, because I sure as hell don’t!

Now from another perspective, maybe what I was given was just a joking way to say hey you might want to fix that error there. But of course, interpreting tone on the Internet is nearly impossible at times so in my humble opinion, it’s just best to keep your mouth shut. I have encountered so many people online whose English writing is far from perfect ever since I became a Lordi fan. I was interacting on websites, FB groups, and forums where most of the fans there were better at typing in say, Finnish, German, French, etc. so when they were required to type in English, it was a bit rusty with typos and grammar errors but I let it slide because I knew it wasn’t their first language even when they told me that because I’m a decent person who just understands that not everyone is fluent right away.

You want to know how I learned this? When I was in elementary school, a new girl came into my class, she did not speak English at all, so she was quiet all the time and I rarely saw her because she was constantly being pulled for ESL classes. A few years later, she started speaking English but stuck to short sentences and she was really quiet as well, I began to befriend her because she seemed really sweet and the last time I saw her in person, she was speaking my language almost perfectly.

It requires patience in that regard. But what about in general? Maybe you meant to help the person who made a typo in a word or forgot a comma. But, that doesn’t mean they will see it that way. If English is not their first language, maybe they will accept your help, but if they’re quite confident in their English, maybe they don’t want to be lectured by you. So know your place, I don’t care if the power of anonymity makes you feel like you can get away with anything, because you are not the English police. It’s annoying so cut it out.

👽Emily