Busy days (and evenings...nights... all-nighters...)

I've been doing a lot of things recently, from buying magazines (Elle, spring fashion, which I'm not obsessed about but I love the flow and line of so many summer clothes), to books (Private by Jammes Patterson and The Killing Place by Tess Gerritsen). I'm quite into my crime novels. Over the summer in 2010 I started reading again ( as in reading for pleasure as it's very relaxing) and I've got through quite a few books. I reccommend James Patterson's "Swimsuit", chilling but good. Henri is a great character- and I remember him from July/August so he must be a strongly written one as well. I find crime and murder novels are often full of those much-coveted "dar adjectives" that people look for when writing "spooky" short stories.

Reading is an excellent way of naturally broadening the range of vocabulary- particularly as I keep a dictionary in my room. It's there mainly so I can look up any word I find that I'm not sure of or just completely don't know, which seals my absoluteness in using the word. There is nothing worse than people who use the wrong words, especially in their mother tongue. There are plenty of children and adolescents whom I have spoken to, whose grip of the English language is quite appauling. Seriously, honestly, if you must speak it (and those of you who are obsequious enough never to shut up, this applies especially to you), please do so with courtesy and respect for a language which is so diverse and cultured. Sure, we've stolen words from other languages- sometimes not even changing them from their originals (such as etcetera [etc.], doppelganger and versus [v or vs.]). But please, PLEASE... I hate to hear those so-often-used phrases that have been conjured up out of Grammar hell;

"Where you to?"
"I need to go toilet."
"I didn't do nothin'!"

I must apologise, but there is not another way to put this. I won't try a nice way. You sound hideous. You sound like an uneducated, uncaring person. And unfortunately, most of the time, that is exactly what you are. I've heard, in my Law class (somehow I thought it would be brimming with conscientious individuals- evidently not) questions such as "What does 'in jest' mean?" and phrases like "You was". This is ridiculous. Pull yourselves together! Please!

There are also fads blooming around Britain that result in conversations which frankly and earnestly try to use "tru d@" (instead of "true, that") and "wubu2" (instead of  "what have you been doing recently?"). I would say "lol" but it would make me just as bad. You can't criticise people if you're then going to go on and become one of them.

I ranted in text that a cashier hadn't taken the safety tag off my clothing and one contact replied "just take it offf youuur selfx". "What the heck is that?" I thought. It's literacy murder, is what it is. I sent her this: "What's with all the misspelling and weird double/triple letters? hard to read much?" ( I didn't want to seem too prim so I put a smily at the end, ":D". She replied, quite irritatingly, "nooo thaats just how i writee". I am shocked and alarmed by this. I am sixteen and for five years I went to school with this girl. Now I talk and write like this, and she writes like that. I'm tempted to tell people that when they write in this ugly, mangled way, they look like idiots. And, to be fair, I'm also tempted to add that were they to talk to me like that I would probably assume they had some sort of mental defect. It's just not natural to want to cut up and stick your language together worse than a two year old does. Were I to say the words "ain't" or "init" in this house, my mother would quite literally give me what I like to call the "stare of patronising parental concern" and immediately ask if I was feeling okay. Which I wouldn't be, I would be feeling annoyed because I'd said such awful things.

My parents are split (not divorced, split) and they never brought me up to talk in an inhibited or strange way, except perhaps the old-fashioned language. And they seem to have instilled within me, their one and only child, the feeling and need to be literarily intuitive. By which, of course, I mean that I can actually write and speak properly. My Polish boyfriend knows WAY better english than most English people do, and that's something he and I bonded over- a loathing of the impudence here. It's horrible. People tar all of us with the same brush, the English. And while I'm not going to exactly speak out far about it, (mainly because most of England won't understand...) I will say this:

Please educate your children. Please educate them well. Then let them make themselves proud. They'll make you proud too, and it will be to your merit.