So, if you say something is shit (adj), obviously that's a bad thing. But, if it's the shit (n), it's a good thing. Similarly, if something is horrorshow (adj), it's a good thing, but if it's a horrorshow (n), it's a spectacularly bad thing. Now, take this and apply non-native speakers. Mayhem, I tell you.

Assume a noun.
If it ends in -us, it's probably singular.
If it ends in -i, it's probably the plural of something that ends in -us.

What does this mean for all of you folks out there playing demon characters?

It means I am going to slap the next person who says 'I am playing a succubi'. No, you idiot, you're playing a succubus, and doing it illiterately. (And the same goes for incubus/incubi, thank you.)

(Why the fuck am I even encountering this? All of these people are supposedly college-age and older!)

Dominant =/= Dominate
Dominant is an adjective: "She is a dominant individual."
Dominate is a verb: "He dominates the room."
Dominator is a noun, and is the actual gender counterpoint to dominatrix, although you will sound silly as shit if you say it.

So please, internets, stop saying things like, "I will only accept dominate males."


Customer =/= Costumer
A customer is someone who buys stuff: "He is a customer of my store."
A costumer is someone who designs costumes: "The costumer for that show did an excellent job!"

Please stop calling customers 'costumers'. While some of them may be, it generally isn't relevant to the point being made, unless maybe you work at a fabric store.


Wile =/= While
Wile is a noun, referring to a trick or artifice: "She enticed her lover with her feminine wiles."
... and sometimes a verb, meaning to lure: "The artistry of her artifice wiled him from his game of Starcraft."

While is a conjunction, indicating stuff at the same time: "Whistle while you work."
... or standing in for 'although': "While he appreciated the offer, he could not accept."
... and sometimes it's a noun, indicating a length of time: "You've been gone a while!" or "I'll be just a little while."

So, don't say, "I'll be done in a wile." Because, dude, if that makes sense at all? It's really not what you meant. Also, 'feminine whiles' should only be used in a totally tongue-in-cheek, semi-misogynist way. "Long have I waited through her feminine whiles..." and so on. (Because that's punny as hell.)

So, I've been doing some reading on toponomy, lately, largely because I've got an empire of post-Roman succubi to derive cities and roads for, and I notice this trend to 'oh, we don't know what the name of this place means, but we're sure there's a linguistic root we haven't found yet'. What? No.

No, really. No.

Has it never occurred to anyone that, well, people put sounds together because they sound good? That, you know, maybe there's no Pelasgian or Proto-Latin root for this town's name because someone just sort of went, 'I want to live here, and I want to call it something that sounds cool when I say it'. Because there's a long history of shit like that. People name their kids like that, sometimes.

I grant that place names that actually indicate something about the place are going to be way the hell more common, which they really are, but I can't help but expect that there will be -- that there are places where the names don't make sense because they're not supposed to. They're just gibberish that sounds cool when you say it.

Jesus fucking christ, people, 'waive' != 'wave'. Let me make this easy.

wave (v): essentially, to undulate, like the sea. You can wave your hand. You can wave a flag.

waive (v): to forgo, put aside, or relinquish. You can waive your fifth amendment rights.

FFS. It's the first feckin' week of January, and already I'm yelling.

Title: Drink From My Glass
Fandom: Viridian Legacy: Glass
Characters: Betty, Arkady
Rating: R (L3 N0 S0 V0 D2)
Warnings: Expletives, explicit illness
Notes: So, not like I needed an excuse to inflict more hell on Arkady, but having been sick since before Christmas kind of makes me think I should.
( Codeine. It's a good thing. )

Title: Oh, My Aching Drama!
Fandom: N/A
Characters: some fop
Rating: G (L0 N0 S0 V0 D0)
Warnings: Kind of crap lights.
Notes: I don't even know. I was looking at the Versailles Tail, and I thought, 'Oh, hey, I bet I've got something I could do with that...' *coughs* So, yeah, here's this. Done in a couple hours of mostly not paying attention while I was reading Miss Maggie Mayhem, who is really pretty effing entertaining.
( O NOES! THE WAAAAANGST! )

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So, I know, you're expecting me to say something about the denigration of women, blah blah. 'Cept I'm really not. I'm going to talk about the history of the word, which may, incidentally, reveal some of my problems with the cultural perception of women in western society.

In the 1630s or '40s, the word 'slattern' started to show up, in reference to women. Probably related to the verb 'slatter', meaning to spill, slosh, or awkwardly splash. (Consider this may also be related to modern 'splatter'.) A slattern was a woman who was unkempt, unclean, or, well, slattered upon. Pretty simple, that.

Now, slut, slattern, and slatter are all from the same roots (Swedish, Dutch, and Low German words of similar meaning), and slut and slattern can be considered dialectical variances in the same word.

Let's get that down to a finer point. A slut is a woman who is physically unclean and does not take care of herself. In fact, Chaucer used the word 'sluttish' to describe a man's appearance, meaning he looked persistently rumpled and unwashed.

From there, it came to mean a woman who was brazen and possibly of loose morals. But, 'loose morals' were sort of implied of anyone who did not take care of their appearance. I'm pretty sure there's a biblical reference that I'm too lazy to look up right now. The fact that 'slut' skips right over actual prostitution and goes straight to a woman who freely provides sex means that it passes right by the slovenly conditions surrounding street-walkers and goes in for the idea that it's another failure not only of morals, but of sense and the ability to care for oneself.

... Say what?

Right, so consider that 'appropriate' kinds of sex for a woman to have were the kinds in which she traded it for something of value, whether food and shelter, in the case of a wife, or money, in the case of a prostitute. Transactional heterosexuality. So, the implied reasoning here is, if a woman hadn't the sense to keep herself clean and her clothes well-fit, then she hadn't got the sense not to give away the only thing of value she had.

Slut: it doesn't just mean you fuck for free. It means you're stupid and dirty, too.

Anyway, it's the sort of word that really shouldn't be applied at all, in the modern era, since we're slowly slaying the beast that is transactional heterosexuality, but if it must be applied, it surely shouldn't be applied to pop stars and middle-class college girls out for a good time. Word just doesn't fit. That free-loving dirt-punk down by the arts district? Yeah, she might be a slut, in the traditional sense, but she's probably also going to kick your ass to the kerb and stomp on it, for saying any such thing.

Thank you. You may now return to mangling the language.

[=EDIT=] Wow, my bad, 'slut' predates 'slattern' by more than 200 years. Sluttish, via Chaucer, circa 1386; slut circa 1402; slattern circa 1639. *coughs* Still, the point remains -- the words from which it evolved do mean dirty, unkempt, or possibly even muddy. The connotation of promiscuity seems to have arisen around 1450, for 'slut'.

The word 'nice'? It's an adjective. "He's nice." "She's nice." "That's nice."

I may not be fond of the word's bland texture, overall, but it's got its place. Which is, in case you wondered, as a descriptor for nouns.

The next person I see using 'ask nice' is going to get a very not-nice punch in the teeth. Nice is an adjective. Adjectives describe nouns. Ask is a verb. There's a very nice part of speech, called 'adverbs', for describing verbs.

See this? This is me asking nicely. Please learn to use fucking adverbs. ('Fucking', there? That's an attributive verb, which is like an adjective, but isn't one. Used in much the same fashion, though.)

So, there's a few weird words I keep seeing horribly misused, and I figured I should clear some things up for the handful of folks in the world who are sufficiently well-educated to know the words exist, but not so much as to use them correctly.

1. ought/aught/naught
'Ought' is nearly never seen without 'to'. That, however, is not the point. The point is that it expresses duty or obligation to perform an action. Where Americans tend to use 'should', 'ought to' can be used, and is technically more correct.

'Aught' on the other had is one of those odd words with two seemingly unrelated meanings. Historically, it is essentially 'anything', as in 'Were there aught I could do, I should do it'. It is sometimes used for the numeral zero, although this is actually wrong, as zero is... wait for it... 'naught'.

'Naught' is 'nothing', as in 'Naught to be done for it, now', or by consequence of this, 'zero', the number, as opposed to an actual quantity.

2. who/whom
I'm sure I've done this one before. Sure of it...

'Who' is a subject. 'Who is at the door? He is at the door.' If you can substitute 'he', and it still makes sense, you want 'who'.

'Whom' is an object. 'To whom does this belong? It belongs to him.' This is a little trickier, because 'whom' questions, at least, need a little twisting for comparison, but basically, if you can use 'him', you want 'whom'. 'To whom does this belong? Does it belong to him?'

And, for the love of fuck 'Who does this belong to?' is always wrong. ALWAYS. Please stop. It makes my eyes bleed, even when I do it. *grins*

3. when/whence
'When' refers to a period of time or a particular circumstance. If you can say 'at what time' or 'in what circumstance' and the sentence still makes sense, you want 'when'.

'Whence' hasn't a bloody damned thing to do with time. It's a question of where. While 'Whence did you come?' is the more technically correct application, 'from whence' also has significant historical precedent.

So, yeah, I'm kind of a bag of dicks when it comes to grammar/spelling atrocities. However? I try to keep that to the native speakers of English. If it's your first language, you really don't have an excuse, with the exception of a few folks I know who were pulled out of school at very young ages, for a variety of reasons.

I'm gonna be a whole shit of a lot nicer to my French Canadian RPers than I am to some gangstee-spelling punter from Detroit. Why? Because I'm sure my French Canadians can spell just fine, in French. And let me note that I usually can't. I speak French in the barest possible way, limited pretty much to 'où sont les toilettes', 'croissant', and 'Je proteste cette merde'.

This is not to say that the Engrish does not give me the epic lulz, because it so does, but holy shit, ESL folks who are trying at all? Giant badasses for even speaking a second language. Mind, I can say some fairly offensive things in seven or eight languages, and ask for the pisser and a fag, in most of those (I've totally spaced it in Yiddish, though, and that makes me sad), but I can't carry on a fucking conversation.

So, I suppose what I'm trying to say here is 'let he who writes a second language well cast the first stone'. Unless we're talking native speakers. In that case? Go nuts.

Dear internets:

• 'Populous' is an adjective describing a place with a lot of people. 'Populace' is what you call the residents of a place.
  Ex: "The populace of the populous city cheered as the festival began."
• 'Principles' are those rules you stand firmly by. 'Principals' are those douchebags in charge of public schools, in the 'States.
  Ex: "The principal stood by his principles, and did not bend the rules."
• 'Everyone' means all the people. 'Every one' means all the things.
  Ex. "With the help of everyone in the park, every one of the cans was picked up."
• 'Everyday' means normal, expected, and unexciting. 'Every day' means all the days.
  Ex. "Every day, I see everyday people living their everyday lives."
• 'Anyone' means any person. 'Any one' means any of a set of things or people.
  Ex. "Anyone could have told him that any one of those trains would take him to the centre of town."

For the love of fuck, anonymice of the broad plains of the intarwebs, quit polishing your brass bottoms and bloody well apply a clue. Not just get a clue, but use it.

No love,
Me.

P.S.: I am not even getting into that whole they're/their/there thing, or who's/whose, or even its/it's.