If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time, you’ve been there.

You compose a cogent, well-written rebuttal or opinion on a message board. Or you tweet something quickly from your iPhone or cell and that pesky autocorrect kicks in. (Most embarrassing autocorrect I’ve experienced: consoling my best friend on the unexpected loss of her uncle had “anyone instead of him” corrected to “Antoine instead of Jim.” Really.) And before you have a chance to edit or re-post with a correction, someone has ignored your entire point and jumped in with a lengthy counterpoint on the correct usage of “it’s.” Grrr.

Today the New York Times has profiled what are colloquially known as “grammar nazis” on the web and their habit of irritating the hell out of everyone and anyone in the name of pedantry. John Cusack comments to the Times on the verbal abuse he’s been subjected to since joining the microblogging service:

“I’m pretty new to it, and if there’s a spell check on an iPhone, I can’t find it,” he said by telephone. “So I basically get in the general ballpark and tweet it.”

Consequently, Mr. Cusack has birthed strange words like “breakfasy” and “hippocrite” and has given a more literary title to his new movie: “Hot Tub Tome Machine.”

Cusack then poses a question we’ve all asked ourselves at one time or another:

“The vitriol was so intense that at first I didn’t think they were serious,” Mr. Cusack said. “Because, like, who would care?”

Who would care, indeed? Well, @capscop, for starters, a Twitter bot dedicated to finding and calling out people who type in all caps on Twitter:

@(redacted) Guess who’s a little caps lock happy? You

@(redacted) Any time that I see you type in all caps I imagine that Billy Mays is saying it.

@(redacted) was trying to make all of their followers deaf with that tweet. Quiet down over there!

And, oh snap:

@(redacted) This isn’t MySpace so maybe you should turn your caps lock off.

The article goes on to detail how many people will freak out and even bring in lawyers when called out for their “twettiquette.” But Cusack prefers to handle it the old fashioned way:

For his part, Mr. Cusack has refused to be silenced. In early April he issued an ultimatum, threatening to block from his account anyone who sniped at his spelling or grammar.

It didn’t work. The people he blocked would return with new account names, “and they’d behave like cranky, obsessive trolls,” Mr. Cusack said.

He has been trying a new strategy, he explained by e-mail: first, he spells things wrong on purpose to get the critics riled up, and then “I blockthem executioer style now with no warning!!”

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Celebrities like John Cusack not immune to twitpickers is a post from: The Inquisitr

As the popularity of text messages and other degraded forms of communication rise, “grammar nazis” have really gotten the short end of the stick, especially on the internet.

Heaven forbid you gently correct someone with an abomination of a status message on Facebook. All of a sudden, you’re the bad guy, and no one ever steps in to defend the poor person who spoke up against the mass defiling of the English language. Well, if there’s any day you should be able to “march forth” with your grammar preservation efforts, it’s- well, March 4th.

Maybe you’re one of the morons, and that’s okay, too. While we are judging (because we can, on Grammar Day!) take a few minutes out of your busy, language-raping schedule to brush up on your skillz. A quick visit to NationalGrammarDay.com offers some gentle reminders that you can talk pretty someday, too. For instance, a lesson on ending sentences with prepositions argues that avoidance of the practice results in clumsy syntax, and should therefore not necessarily be judged:

You can’t say, “What did you step?” You need to say, “What did you step on?” to make a grammatical sentence.

I can hear some of you gnashing your teeth right now, while you think, “What about saying, ‘On what did you step?’” But really, have you ever heard anyone talk that way? I’ve read long, contorted arguments from noted grammarians about why it’s OK to end sentences with prepositions when the preposition isn’t extraneous (1), but the driving point still seems to be, “Nobody in their right mind talks this way.” Yes, you could say, “On what did you step?” but not even grammarians think you should.

If you want to use a Sharpie to rogue-correct some abused apostrophes, though, I won’t tell.

March 4th is National Grammar Day- feel free to unleash your inner pedant is a post from: The Inquisitr

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson toured the United States last spring, wiping out errors as they went along. Every time they corrected a sign, they blogged it, and their infamy delivered them mainstream media interviews at the time. Unfortunately for them though they missed the sign that said “Don’t F*&k with the US Government” and decided to correct a historical sign in the Grand Canyon National Park. Thankfully (or unfortunately) some one was reading their blog who knew the sign, and the value it had.

According to reports, Deck and Herson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to vandalize government property and were sentenced to a year’s probation, during which they cannot enter any national park or modify any public signs. They also had to cough up $3,000 to repair the sign.

Proof perhaps that there is true justice in this world.

Justice in this world: grammar nazis get pwnd is a post from: The Inquisitr