classy stuff!

*yes, i know you’re not supposed to start a sentence with a conjunction, but it sounds like the kind of thing that would annoy the fuck out of winston churchill, which makes doing it even more enjoyable.

James Stanley: For an article criticising poor English, I see a lot of poor English … using capital letters correctly is the most important step in making your English look literate…

a ‘lot’ of poor english? what then, apart from the heinous crime of not using capital letters, offends you so much about my use of english?

as regards capital letters being the ‘most important’ factor in making english look literate, we’ll have to agree to disagree there. personally i find the use of ‘txt spk’ or the inability to distinguish ‘there’, ‘their’, ‘they’re’, ‘were’, ‘we’re’, ‘where’, ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ to be much more of a badge of illiteracy than the *deliberate* refusal to use capital letters. but then, of course, i am extremely biased so YMMV* [oh yes. i do use capital letters for acronyms!]

BTW [hey! there i go again. i have got a shift key, after all. it's just covered in cobwebs!] i think i could make a good case for the abandoning of capital letters being a great democratic reform. i suppose the use of capitals in the first place comes from the germanic roots of english, where all nouns are capitalised. this has largely gone now but we’re left with the pointless capitalisation of sentences and names and also that strangely subservient convention whereby you’re supposed to capitalise any possessives when talking about your betters; ‘His Majesty favoured me with a two-fingered salute’, ‘God gave His only begotten son…’ etc.

methinks capital letters therefore are an evil tool for oppressing the lower orders, the workers and miscellaneous other such downtrodden [and probably lumpen] masses

[* your mileage may vary]

My 2 bits from across the big waters.

Your personal stylistic decisions are your prerogative, of course. It still makes you look a bit of a knob, though, when you’re complaining about others’ poor spelling and grammar.

:: note :: for those of you questioning the grammatical integrity of previous sentence, us is the correct word, as it is the object of the preposition of. we (which undoubtely, many people would have tried to use in place of us) is a subjective pronoun, rendering it grammatically incapable of being used as an object. i used yanks as a predicate nominative (fancy grammar-speak for using a noun to describe another noun); it’s just extra. take out yanks and the obviousness of using us instead of we becomes readily apparent.

next time on english with aaron: dispelling the myth that gerunds can’t be used as indirect objects.

YANK: i could care less about ….

you fuckwitt! – if you could care less about something that means you care about it to some degree – hence your potential for ‘caring less’. the correct phrase is ‘i couldn’t care less about …’ ie. i care so little about the thing in question that it is not actually physically possible for me to care any less. i have reached the absolute nadir of caring about whatever it is!

why is that so fucking hard for you to understand?

my choosing not to use capital letters is a personal stylistic decision, the aesthetic reasons for which i can go into at length [and often do!] there is all the difference in the world between this and being palin illiterate.

Sentences start with capitals.
The word “I” as in the first person singular is always capitalised.

Otherwise, I would have to agree. There seems to be some kind of global conspiracy
to mis-spell the word definite. I haven’t seen it spelt correctly now for several
months. Someone, somewhere appears to have decided that henceforth it shall be
“definate”.

Noooooooooooooooooooo. I blame Word: If it doesn’t underline it, people assume it
is correct. That having been said, MS Word DOES underline definate – so why can’t
anyone get it right?