There’s nothing like seeing someone do something similar to what I have done in the past to teach me important lessons in life.
Example – I used to rant a lot online but now I try to temper it, because I've seen others be negative ALL the time, day after day, and I realise now how much it wears down the shiny on everyone who reads it. It becomes obvious it’s purely for attention and pity. They don’t want anyone to fix anything about their life, they don’t even want to try and fix it themselves, they just want everyone to feel their pain. They exist in their pain. It’s truly tiresome.
Yet, because I’ve been there myself, I can empathise, and hope that one day they too will see how damaging it becomes.
And so, tonight, in a perfect example of contradiction, I find myself outraged at the trivial things other people become outraged about. Like grammar and punctuation.
I can high-horse it with the best of them when it comes to misuse of the possessive apostrophe, the incorrect your/you’re, or there/their/they’re, and the very cringe worthy “should/could/would OF”, but I have now been shown the error of my ways. I will henceforth loosen my stance, having seen how ridiculous it makes a person look to be so petty.
Tonight’s lesson is brought to you by the ellipsis, commonly represented by a series of three dots […]. Until tonight, I had never known anyone to be upset by people perhaps using only two dots, or four, or more than four, instead of the standard (and apparently required at all times) three.
My first reaction was to try and understand why, out of all the horrible evil wrongs that occur in the world every minute of every day, someone would choose to be annoyed enough by this to mention it in a public forum.
I despair at the things people channel their energy towards when there are so many more worthwhile causes requiring our outrage and our help to fix.
People should be allowed to paint their sentences with whatever colours they wish. If they want to use more dots for effect, so be it! Less? Fine! Go for it. Who are we to constrict another’s sentence construction? If the great writers of the world all followed the rules to the letter our literature would all be dull beige today. e.e cummings would be raked over the coals, for sure.
So, out of my petty outrage at someone’s petty outrage, I’ve managed to learn another lesson: live and let live, write and let write. Let. It. Go.
Language is our putty to sculpt with as we wish, into whatever we wish, however we wish. Go forth and sculpt unencumbered.
