Religious kiosk sheds light on poor grammar

By RYAN JONES
Special to The Collegian

While walking past the USU Pit Tuesday morning, I noticed four large sheets of wood vertically erected into a topless cube.

On each side a different question was spray-painted at the top:

" What happens after death?"

"How do you experience God?"

" Who is Jesus?"

"What is your purpose?"

All sides had a Sharpie marker attached to a string. Sadly, a public display of this nature, prompting written response, will inevitably attract its normal fill of sarcastic wise-cracks and disrespectful morons, and all this was wonderfully presented by the comic genius who responded to the question, "What is your purpose?" with "to masterbate dialy [sic]".

I laughed.

Assuming that the author put all his effort into thinking up the wonderfully clever comment and was so excited he forgot how to spell both words (I’m making a bold move and guessing this is a male).

I moved along and continued to read one grammatical mistake after another.

“Spred.”

“Salvaition.”

“Recive” and “judgement.”

These were among just a few of the verbally deceased in this display, in addition to:

“Pergatory.”

“Intiment”, and “cemetary”.

“Exhault.”

“Sprit [spirit].”

“Cronic” [chronic] and “your” instead of “you’re” were also publicly murdered.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve been under the assumption that I was attending a university, which is defined by Webster’s (that’s a dictionary, for those who wrote on the boards) as “an educational institution of the highest level”.

Since when do high level academic institutions admit people who read, write, or spell at a sub-elementary school level?

Even if all of these verbal perpetrators are freshmen, they should still have at least ten years of fundamental English skills. One full decade dedicated to constructing sentences and using a basic vocabulary should be sufficient enough to stop a 22-year-old from writing “intiment” instead of “intimate”.

“But,” you say, “I’m a bad speller.”

Easy solution—buy a dictionary. And use it.

They’re cheap, have over 50,000 definitions and come in all sizes. This means that you can conveniently keep one in your backpack and look up a word before you publicly insult your intelligence.

I’m not sure whether it is laziness, ignorance, bad foundational teaching, bad remedial teaching, stupidity or academic apathy, but whatever the case is, college students need to be intelligent enough to spell and write beyond a 5th-grade level.

If they’re not, they must quickly learn. It’s frightfully embarrassing to know that our future leaders are “masterbating dialy,” “smoking cronic,” and “spreding” and “exhaulting salvaition.”

So please, before you profess your ignorance to the 25,000 people on campus, respect your past English teachers and use a dictionary.