I love Strawberry-Kiwi Jell-o.

The quote of the day on my Google start page:

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.

- Randy K. Milholland

Fitting, huh? Maybe I'm known as a grammar freak by a lot of you. Heaven only knows that I drive my loved ones crazy with little-known or oft-misused rules of grammar or spelling. I just have a problem with folks who don't want to take the time to learn their native tongue and then convert that knowledge to execution.

Certain excuses baffle me. How about the common, "That's not the way we learned to say it where I come from"? Fine. But the rules of mathematics were applied correctly where you come from. Why not those of the English language, too?

Anyway... the point of my sharing the quote with you: I get distracted by incorrect grammar. I'm sometimes so lost in the thought that someone just ended their sentence with a preposition or used the wrong spelling of a word (their - there - they're, for example) that I totally miss the message they're trying to convey in their speech or writing. I'll admit it. I sometimes don't really know what you just said, but I know how to correct it.

So what about the regional idiosyncracies in our language that make us who we are? Our accents, our dialects, our euphemisms? Aren't these things to be preserved? Passed down from one generation to the next, in order to give each of us a sense of place... belonging... home? I believe we should hang on to these things. But I don't believe we should forfeit our knowledge of the English language in the process.

Enough of my rambling. I'm not sure what I just said, and I probably made several grammatical errors (sure to be pointed out by those of you looking to "one-up" me). But all I'm really trying to convey in all of this is that I love strawberry-kiwi Jell-o.

Good night, all. Here's to the best week possible.