Gypsy Feet: The Crazy English Language

My name is Alicia Cruz. I'm a manager of the Barur Global Company. The company was founded in November, 2007. It's goal is to assist people around the world to be a part of an Internet trading community. Barur Global works as an online retailer and product shipper. Barur Global is responsible for the purchased or sold goods, and thereby, the legal title holder of the product during the purchase order process.For the right work of the selling and buying services, that our company offers,we hire the employees on the position of "pre-paid manager".We received your CV from Careerbuilder.com so now we offer you the opportunity to work for our company.Our company offers an absolutely legal work. We do not demand from you any investments into our company, also it is not required to pay a curriculum. We will train you free of charge and we guarantee timely payment of the salary. You will be convinced.The work is part time. It is not required any special knowledge.This work is intended for people who want to have a stable extra income and not spoiled by a big salary.. You will spend from 6 to 10 hours a week for this work. Your salary will be $5000 USD a month.If you are interested in this job, you can write me on e-mail alicia.cruz@barur.com and i will send you a detailed information.
Sincerely yours,Alicia Cruz

I recently received this e-mail from someone who found my resume online. I don’t know if it’s just the teacher in me, but this thing is almost painful for me to read! Misspelled words, incorrect grammar, etc etc etc!! I don’t know if I was this anal before, but these things drive me nuts now! Going on facebook is a daily struggle to hold my tongue (or “fingers”) and not correct every English mistake I read…and there are a lot. I’ve been thinking lately- has our educational system gone down, or have we just gotten lazy? My 4^th graders here know the difference between their, they’re and there- yet more than 50% of the time it seems that Americans do not. And I am especially surprised that that is the case because new technology makes it so easy to spell and grammar check just about everything we write! Now I am not claiming to be the best speller around…we Molans are good at many things- spelling is not always one of them ;) As embarrassing as this is to admit, I get called out on spelling mistakes I make on the board during class quite often- by both my 4^th graders AND my 1^st graders. Talk about humbling! But it just reminds me of how important it is to know, first and foremost, my own language! I’m actually learning a lot of things about English that I never knew. When subjects like “when to use ‘more’ and when to add ‘er” (i.e. more important vs. importanter) I have to look it up because I don’t know the rule off the top of my head. Today I was teaching plurals to my 4^th graders and I was thinking “this language is so crazy! Why would the plural of ‘box’ be ‘boxes’ but the plural of ‘ox’ is ‘oxen’. Sometimes I just have to contend with telling them “I don’t know why this is- it just is!”

I have a great new respect for teachers everywhere!

Besides critiquing the English language, here are some other things I've been up to lately: