Good English

It's amazing what we can get away with in spoken language. Little indiscretions that are easily forgiven as part of slang, accent, or just speaking quickly. We've pretty much dropped "whom" from everyday speech, and if you end a sentence with a preposition you will probably not be made fun of by your peers (unless you are an English teacher who hangs out with other English teachers in which case you probably deserve it.) In most circles you can even get away with saying "I seen the bridge was out. If I was you I'd go where the new bridge is at." For extra points on your SAT find at least three errors in that quote.
Written language is where things start to get tricky. Effect and affect sound almost the same when spoken, but unfortunately cannot be used interchangeably. The various forms of there, their, and they're require no thought when spoken, but when written tend to show a lack of concern by the author for the actual meaning of words. Plural word's that are neither possessive in nature nor contraction's don't require apostrophe's, and yet they're so often present in an otherwise correct piece of prose.
But how often are we writing anything where we don't have red squiggly lines that appear to show a misspelling, or green squiggly lines to show a grammar violation? Have you even been asked to help someone with the formatting of their word processor because they can't get rid of all the red and green lines that appear seemingly randomly throughout their document?
It's in our rare adventures into public writing that we need to be most careful. Business signs, marquees, and billboards with obvious mistakes give doubt to the quality of the product or service being advertised. Misspelling words in Christmas lights is just funny. Writing out slogans on your car window with white shoe polish makes you a traveling example of why kids should pay attention in school.
Today, as I was walking my son to school, I saw in a car window "Billy (names have not been changed), go higher then B4." I assume Billy is competing in some sport like pole vaulting or high jumping that requires him to go higher in order to do better, and that the driver of the minivan in question was not encouraging Billy to push the limits of his illegal drug use in order to "go higher." I'm still wondering what Billy is supposed to do after going higher. First he must go higher, then he must B4. No one could be so careless as to confuse the comparative "than" with the word "then," at least not in such a public medium as shoe polish on your car window. Poor Billy, I sure hope he studies hard in school, then goes on to higher levels of education than his mother did.


Obviously I've opened up the door on this one. Feel free to peruse my past posts looking for grammatical errors and point them out to me. Please don't mention the unnecessary apostrophes in the last line of the second paragraph; they're there for their own irony.