Is it just me, or has Microsoft Word’s grammar check gotten even more quirky lately?  Like, gone around the bend, quirky?  I mean, it has always done its best to get me to re-phrase everything, or change my tense when I didn’t want to, or – this is a favorite  – it tells me I’ve got a fragmented sentence. Uh-huh, yeah, I know it’s a fragment.  Dammit!  I meant for it to be!  Now, leave me the f…- uh – the flock alone!  Damned thing would have every manuscript be a dry string of perfectly constructed crap.

It has always been good at telling me such things as, what I really meant was “her” instead of “she”( as in “Her ran up the stairs”) or it would tell me I meant “he” instead of “himself” (that would be “He scratched he on the rosebush”).  Yesterday, though, it gave me a whole new perspective on  contractions involving personal pronouns.   This is my new all time favorite example of its insistence that I should change what I’ve written.  It told me what I really wanted in my sentence was – and I swear to God this is true – it told me I wanted “me’m” instead of “I’m”.  So.  My sentence should have read, “Me’m going to load the dishwasher, now”.

Uh-huh. Who the hell wrote the grammar program? I wish I had thought to copy that one. I did show it to my daughters.  After all, they came running,wanting to know just why I was rolling on the floor, howling myself silly (I know, I know, grammar check; that should be “howling me silly”.  Hush).  Of course, now neither of us can resist making that particular substitution in our speech, you know, just to see how it works.  And, we’ve managed to come up with some others, too (such as we’m, it’m, you’m, etc.  There’s more, just can’t remember them all right now).  We’ve had some interesting conversations since then.

Okay, gotta get back to writing, so me’m finished with this post, now.

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