I was driving through the main parking lot behind Walbaums, etc, where painted white arrows clearly mark which direction you are supposed to be driving when heading down the parking lanes. I was carefully headed in the correct direction, when I needed to pass someone who was waiting for a spot. As I pulled around, someone was coming in the other direction, just at the beginning of the lane basically sitting on the arrow pointing towards the back of their car. I tried to tell him he needed to back up so traffic could move.
Instead, he made some gestures, then opened a Hamptons Magazine and sat their and read it while me, and everyone behind me, waited for the other car to pull into the space.
This delayed everyone, just so this guy could ‘win’ by driving in the wrong direction.
What a rude idiot!
-C
Yeah, C. I am feeling your pain, but I would suggest you double check your use of certain words in your tale(s) of woe…it is “there,” not “their.” It just makes you seem silly.
s.p. ellingbee, you’re a bully.
No BL, S.P. Ell(l?)ingby is not a bully by any means. Perhaps a bad typist, but that would be presuming that I know how to spell Ell(l?)ingby. A lot of very valid comments are posted on this site…but their meaning, and the writers’ intent in submitting them is diminished, and risks being lost, or dismissed entirely if it is written using bad grammar.
It is really a shame that Spell Check or Grammar check (what ever happened to that, anyway…?) are not available on this site. The reason I am bothering to say that bullying is not the case, as per your accusation, is because it is a studied fact that speaking proper English provides the speaker, automatically, with more authority, a presumption of being more - or at least properly - educated, i.e., an edge. Their comments are accorded more worth, more validity. A lot of the city folk who who can afford homes in the Hamptons come out here to get away from what they consider aural assaults on both their ears and the time they have taken to learn how to behave properly, i.e., by speaking properly. To do so is a part of good manners. Not to bother, is self-limiting.
I once worked with a young woman who slaughtered the English language. And she knew more than I did, and for that matter more than any three of the executives with whom she worked. My teeth ached when I listened to her. I had to force myself to listen to her. And I only took the time to listen to her, because early on in our association (I was putting in time, i.e., paying my dues in this position) when she said made a suggestion that was so patently obvious, which we all had missed, and which none of those with the authority to acknowledge and implement paid any attention to not put into action, until after I’d asked her more about the matter in question.
I took her point to her, and my superiors, stating that she had said such and such in our meeting and that we should listen to her, she knew the entire history of the situation and all the players. I was a newbie, yet I was given the credit for it. To be truthful, I don’t think the men I worked with really knew what they were doing…but the fact of life is that lower intelligence, and a lack of presentability is associated with bad grammar. I have had my “ideas” stolen in the competitive atmosphere of the workplace…the complicity, the trickery, those small, minor-facial expressions of self-satisfion and self- congrats at having gotten away with something which folks who do steal others work make when they assume someone else isn’t watching were not present. Esssentially, l was translating for them. And although I credited her everytime, they never put it together, that those were her ideas…although they adopted most of them.
Repeatedly, in meetings at which this young and talented woman was present and providing valuable information and input - she was the firm’s intellectual capital after a takeover - I reiterated her remarks immediately after she’d uttered them, so that they would not be lost on/to those present. We had a large job to do and she provided most of the input and did most of the legwork, including copying and collating. She also wrote position papers and brochures, even advertising copy. She edited the content of the same. I edited her grammar and frequently had to dumb it down where she had assumed a knowledge level higher than the material’s intended audience would have been likely to have had.
She was paid as a mere secretary. Not as an executive secretary…Not as an Assistant, nor as an Executive Assistant. She had only a high school degree, a grating accent and repeatedly made common grammatical errors regarding plurality and verb correlation, pronouns, hanging phrases, etc. She hadn’t the nerve to ask for a raise because she had only a high school education. And she wouldn’t have been given one. Her superiors might have begun to recognize her value, but they couldn’t full utilize her talents - and why pay her more when they didn’t have to?
I took a job at another firm. Before I left, I asked her to have lunch with me. I had decided I would be doing her a terrible injustice if I didn’t mention what was an easily fixable problem. However, correcting someone’s use of the language without sacrificing their dignity is a very difficult and a delicate task. I began cautiously. I told her I had thoroughly enjoyed working with her and that she knew more than all the people she worked for, put together. I told her I had something to tell her and that in no way did I intend any offense by it. I said I wanted to help her and asked her if she’d mind if what I wanted to say to her carried some criticism. She smiled at me, and said no, of course not. (We’d gotten along very well. She hadn’t seemed to mind my getting credit for her ideas; she was happy just to see the ideas implemented. She was a true team player. But she had so much more to offer that it was astounding.
So I told her that no one was listening to her because of her diction and grammar. She was genuinely surprised (as she had had no idea.) I pointed out to her that she, too, did it as she had objected to my dumbing down the use of certain expressions in some of our advertising copy, assuming our audience was smarter than our research indicated. I then told her that she was being victimized, used, and abused. Rather than repeating her own speech patterns and errors, I chose to use a Southern dialect to drive my point home.(I’d taken some classes in the South and had picked up what was a complete hash of several different dialects.) She laughed and told me I sounded like a hick. I then repeated a few of mispronunciations and a few of her more common grammar errors - and told her that those mistakes and others, just as easy to abandon and hert accent were keeping her down. I told her she should go to college; that I’d help her get scholarships, grants, etc. and gave her my new phone #.
One day about ten years later I ran into her on the street. She looked happy; her clothes were noticably more expensive, even her posture had improved. I asked her what she was doing. We sat down for a quick chat over a cup of coffee. She told me that our lunch had changed her life. But that she hadn’t had the money for college. What she had done was to trade seamstress skills I hadn’t even know she possessed for diction coaching at a local rep company. She is now the personal assistant for a local and prominent CEO. She acts, even adopting other dialects, in the rep co’s productions from time to time.
Holy cow. Nothing better to do today huh? Did the Independent rebuff your literary skills?