I prolly should of went

It's Thanksgiving, so what am I doing? Musing and fuming about "the death of the language" in daily usage.

I know that languages are living things, constantly evolving, etc., but that's not going to stop me, no sirree. I've come here to gripe and that's what I'm a'gonna do.

Some things have bugged me for years, like "nite" instead of night; "alright" instead of all right. ["Already" is a word, but "alright" is most definitely not a word -- or all right, for that matter.] But, I suppose, what can one expect when it has become perfectly all right to pronounce "nuclear" as the folksy new-cyue-ler.

To quote Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding, "Sometimes I think, 'I must go mad'." [Groucho is shown here with his perennial foil Margaret Dumont.]

And don't get me started on the it's thing. Long story short, it's is not the possessive of it any more than her's is the possessive of her. It's is a contraction, and it means "it is," not "belonging to it." I shudder every time I think of its misuse.

My latest target is quite possibly the most ignorant of the lot. It is the non-word "prolly." It evidently evolved from a misunderstanding of "probably." Using such logic (that a "bab" can be replaced by a single "l"), it seems that Ali La and the 40 Thieves is an apt rewrite of this old tale's title.

So, I'm prolly tilting at windmills, but some things simply need to be said. Of course, there's always the old stand-by "should of" which is a perversion of "should've," another contraction (short for should have"). No excuse here but simple ignorance of grammar, specifically of verb tenses.

Is this stuff even taught anymore? I remember doing sentence diagrams under the watchful eye of Sister Mary Cellophane in the third grade, fer cryin' out loud! And it did me a ton of good, too! (in case any of the good Sisters of Mercy are reading this)

As many of you know, the real title of this post is I probably should have gone. To a movie before dinner, that is, instead of ranting.

Do you see what happens when I have too much time on my hands???