Letter to My Reader
Eats Meats West seems to have gotten its first bit of publicity in the form of a wall post on Bojangles' official Facebook page. Official. This explains the sudden increase (and later drastic decline) in anonymous commenting on that page. As of this writing "141 people [liked it]." I'm not completely sure what that number means, because less than half of them left an actual comment. Maybe this is my problem with Facebook in general. The below real comment, which mirrors many of the others, is followed by my imaginary response. It's imaginary in the sense that I don't actually use Facebook. Funny Nurse had to point it out to me.
"Would love to hear from the blogger from what high school (if any) he/she graduated. "Meats" should be "meets". "Sweat" should be "Sweet" and "Chik-fil-a" should be "Chick-fil-A"
October 19 at 9:55am"
There are many things that confuse me about this complaint:
1) I'm to be criticized for mistaking "sweat" for "sweet," yet this person is absolved from using subjects in sentences. That doesn't seem fair.
2) Is "from" used too many times for your liking? Me too. If it's not used incorrectly, it's at least used excessively and unhelpfully.
3) Also, why are we to assume that the highest level of eduction I obtained was at the high school level? Or is the assumption rather that spelling mastery is obtained in high school, and no mention of it occurs at any educational point thereafter?
4) Please put your periods within the quotation marks, bitch!
5) I'm further confused why the title of the blog itself, Eats Meats West, isn't an obvious play on words to everyone. First of all, I'm coming late to this game, and a lot of names were already taken. Maybe I would have chosen "Eats Meet West," but I sort of like the play on words. Secondly, it's a food blog, and Asian cuisine is frequently presented by a New Yorker. Did that not register?
6) And finally, and this is perhaps the most salient point: This isn't my job, and to be perfectly fair I do revise posts numerous times and do my best to present humorous, readable text. Sometimes mistakes make their way through, but I think I'm getting my points across. My mother is an English professor, after all, so I have a lot to live up to.
There are many things that confuse me about this complaint:
1) I'm to be criticized for mistaking "sweat" for "sweet," yet this person is absolved from using subjects in sentences. That doesn't seem fair.
2) Is "from" used too many times for your liking? Me too. If it's not used incorrectly, it's at least used excessively and unhelpfully.
3) Also, why are we to assume that the highest level of eduction I obtained was at the high school level? Or is the assumption rather that spelling mastery is obtained in high school, and no mention of it occurs at any educational point thereafter?
4) Please put your periods within the quotation marks, bitch!
5) I'm further confused why the title of the blog itself, Eats Meats West, isn't an obvious play on words to everyone. First of all, I'm coming late to this game, and a lot of names were already taken. Maybe I would have chosen "Eats Meet West," but I sort of like the play on words. Secondly, it's a food blog, and Asian cuisine is frequently presented by a New Yorker. Did that not register?
6) And finally, and this is perhaps the most salient point: This isn't my job, and to be perfectly fair I do revise posts numerous times and do my best to present humorous, readable text. Sometimes mistakes make their way through, but I think I'm getting my points across. My mother is an English professor, after all, so I have a lot to live up to.
So what lessons have we learned? Well for one thing, Bojangles' has an accent mark on the s. The s, people! Most of us are apparently not jazzed about ee/ea deconstructions. Many don't seem to see the difference between (or don't care about) commenting on a specific Bojangles' Facebook wall post (which is itself a comment on another website) versus making general declarative statements about Bojangles'. And last of all, nothing beats a Bo Berry Biscuit.
1 Comments:
Regarding spelling and misspelling, I'd like to add my 2 cents.
1st penny's worth: I recall that when my children were enrolled in an academically gifted program, the program's director advised me to ignore their spelling scores, which were disproportionately lower than all the others, because evidently, smart students often spell poorly.
2nd penny's worth: "I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way." -- Mark Twain If only he had inserted "only" in the right position. :)
However, I may not be the best source for advice on this matter. I composed this comment on Word, relying on their spell- checker first. I'm ashamed to admit that I misspelled "misspelled" and "spelling." Then, I checked with a dictionary to discover that it's not "spell check"; it's "spell-checker." So maybe I have a 3rd penny’s worth. Is all this effort worth it when we're relaying our eating experience at Bojangles'? (I just researched the apostrophe placement!)
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