Texting and Purple Crayons

All that texting may be hurting kids' grammar - NewsChannel5.com | Nashville News, Weather & Sports

     Ya think?  I will preface the following rant by saying I was raised by a scientist who could also write.  Strange, no?  One of the first things she said to me after I returned home during my freshman year of college was "Honey, your vocabulary has really deteriorated."  She was right.  I blame the beer.  As children, we started out slowly reading-wise in my house.  You know... a little Richard Scary, some Velveteen Rabbit... then *BAM* straight into "The Hobbit".  No pictures, all chapters and each reading session became an intensive vocabulary lesson.  I got double nerded on that one. (And yes, I realize I should have said "I received a healthy dose of nerd on those frigid winter nights while listening to the melodious voice of my Mummy narrate a full and unabridged accounting of "The Hobbit".  Ha! Ha!" while gazing drolly at you over a snifter of port.  Bite me.  The first way is more fun. And less typing.)

     Texting hurts us all, really.  It causes car wrecks, all sorts of misunderstandings (i.e. - http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/ which I.  FREAKIN'.  LOVE.), not to mention it is a FANTASTIC time waster, but it is not the only grammatically incorrect sword that chips away at our children's spongy grey matter.  Let me introduce "Harold and the Purple Crayon".  (cue ominous dum-dum-DUUUUUMMMM music)  A classic, right?  It is a grammar murderer in a pretty purple clown suit. (I HATE clowns and their nasty painted faces.  What are you really hiding behind that grease paint, Mr. Clown?  Sadness and evil?  I can believe it.) There isn't one correctly placed comma or period in the whole damn book!  Sentences begin and end a random!  It is a vocab CLUSTER!  I have this uncontrollable urge to grab a red pen and bleed all over the pages of that book every time I read it to Sass Monkey.  The worst part is... he LOVES Harold.  How am I supposed to refuse when he so sweetly asks "Can we wead Purple Cwayon, Mommy?"  You see, there's a dragon under the apple tree that he can't get enough of... not to mention the 9 kinds of pie....  (Really Harold, a Porcupine and a Moose?  We all know that, even in *Canada, it would be one angry opossum and feral dog that finished THAT picnic.)  So I grit my teeth, we open the book, and I correct the hell out of that mo' fo' on the fly because, I'll be damned if I give Sass Monkey one more excuse to speak like a Kardashian.

* I'm not sure where Harold is supposed to be from, but :
     1.  He hangs out with moose and porcupines, and
     2.  Caillou is bald and a Quebecer
... so I'm rolling with it.