You Might Be An Idiot If...

No, I'm not Jeff Foxworthy. I'm not even a Jeff Foxworthy-wannabe. I'm not going to even list a bunch of funny lines like Foxworthy does about Rednecks. But a few recent e-mails (and past ones) that an old friend of mine sent have prompted me to write this. No, we're not friends anymore, which is why I'm more comfortable in writing this.

For you adults and young adults out there, have you ever read or tried to the best of your abilities to read an e-mail by someone around your age that appeared to be typed by a 1st grader? It's painful, isn't it? I can hear the nails against the chalkboard right now just from thinking about it.

First off, there's poor punctuation (if any at all). They may neglect to use periods and commas, so when you try to read the dang thing, you may have to re-read a sentence two or three times, because you find yourself reading quickly from one sentence to the next without much pause. This is when I mutter quietly to myself, "Wait, something's not right. Let me read that again." If this happens once or even twice in a lengthy e-mail, I can tolerate it to an extent, but if the entire e-mail is filled with these punctuation-less run-ons, I get a little annoyed.

Secondly, a high quantity of misspellings irritates me, especially of small words. It reminds me of the movie "Dumb and Dumber," when Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) attempts to read an article from the newspaper about Mary Swanson. He gets to the word "the" and has a very difficult time trying to pronounce it. Jim says, "Ta-heh, teh-heh." Jeff Daniels then helps the young lad out by pronouncing the word for him, "Thuh." Again, I can tolerate a couple misspellings here and there, because, we've all made them before. But, if a person misspells a particular word throughout the e-mail, chances are that this isn't just any old human error (they're an idiot). In an e-mail I received recently, this person consistently spelled the word "worship" with an "a" and not an "o" to make it "warship." When I look at the keyboard, the "o" and the "a" are on opposite sides of one another. One is typed with the left hand and the other is typed with the right. How can someone make that mistake? War ship? The naval war ship? No, "I warship God." That did give me something to laugh about. Anytime I hear or read the word "worship," I'm going to chuckle a bit.

Receiving e-mails can be nice, but if they're from certain people, I have to make sure I'm in the right mood and state of mind before I go reading them. If not, then I'm going to need some advil to aid me as I rest my head after attempting to read the dang thing.

What's the moral of the story? When sending e-mails, write in complete sentences and use spell check! The only problem with spell check is if a person doesn't know how to spell a certain word, who knows if they'll recognize the correct spelling given to them by spell check. Class dismissed.