Gremmer anyone?

Given the fact that English is my third language, it never ceases to amaze me how many people misspell the most commonly used words. My all time favorites are

their = “belonging to them”
they’re = “they are”
there = “not here, but over there”

and

we’re = “we are”
were = past tense of “are”

or

you’re = “you are”
your = “belonging to you”

I am almost getting used to seeing these words being used interchangeably. For example, the company that delivers our bottled water recently sent us a letter informing us “You’re monthly water bill is going up” and “We have never before raised you’re rate.” They went on to use “you’re” instead of “your” about 4 or 5 times. It may seem like a dumb thing to even notice, but after all I am trusting these people to provide me with pure water and they don’t even know the first thing about grammar. Maybe they don’t know how to read a water test, either?

There seems to be similar confusion over the correct usage of the letter “s” at the end of a word. Correctly, one would add “s” to a word to make it plural (duck->ducks), ” ‘s ” to show that something belongs to someone (Mike -> Mike’s), and only ” ‘ ” to show that something belongs to a plural word that already ends with the letter s (parents -> my parents’ car).

Having said all that, I always find it amusing to browse craigslist.org for some bargains and coming across funny misspellings. Who really wants to buy a “dubble brest pump”? Or how about some maternity “cloths” – are they intended to be draped over the bulging midsection? I wonder if a “Whinnie the Pooh” walker makes children more prone to whining. When we were looking for a second fridge a couple of months ago I knew to search for “refridgerator” instead of “refrigerator”, since the misspelling is used almost universally. On and on the list goes.

Notice I have not mentioned anything about punctuation, correct verb tenses, or anything else that one would expect to learn in elementary school.

My only question is why almost $1,400 of our property taxes this year went to the public schools in this city, or why according to their own figures the public schools in this state spend about $ 8,000 to $ 12,000 a year on each student, depending on how many they can diagnose with ADHD or another bogus disorder, thus categorize them as disabled and collect more funds.

Kids today may not learn spelling anymore, but many are able to work a DVD player or flip through their favorite channels almost as soon as they can crawl over to the family altar the entertainment center. Many adults can’t spell properly, but most probably know off the top of their head how many inches their TV measures, and how much the newer and bigger TV costs that they wish they had.

And homeschooling is considered weird…