Deterioration of Grammar Skills

My grammatical skills have deteriorated. However, my annoyance factor with grammatical errors have enhanced exponentially, so that I am still keenly pained by the amount of gross errors I see elsewhere, but I am incapable of utilizing correct usage in my own writing.

Came across a very nice website today. I'd like to share it with y'all, so here it is: Crunchable.net. This actually leads you to an article I was reading regarding hyphens. I know, it's a dry subject. Who really wants to read about correct usage of hyphens anyway? But you know that the writer is a damned good one if he/she can make hyphens exciting as hell. So go read it. It'll help you understand the little "-" just a bit more.

I recently got a chance to check up on my blog at statcounter.com, just to check numbers and etc. I haven't had much time or the energy since I got back to do a thorough check, but I did today. So I did. And I always love looking at the list of search words entered through search engines like Google and Yahoo, that people have used to get to me here at my blog. One of the search words I found in this episode was "unfornately taco."

This same phrase was run through both Yahoo and Google (the one through Yahoo leads you to an MSN thing for some reason). Why on earth is somebody looking for "unfornately taco?" I mean, even if it was spelled correctly, "unfortunately taco" doesn't really make sense. I mean, can tacos even be unfortunate? And as we all know, the -ly attached at the end of the word "unfortunate" indicates that it is an adverb, and hence, modifies a verb or another adjective. Taco, a noun, cannot be modified by an adverb such as unfortunately.

Well, I ran the search myself, and came up with my site. Listed second in the Google search engine. Go see for yourself. I was mortified. Self-proclaimed grammatical perfectionista, and here I was. I wrote a benign post about a taco I had at 3AM. This is a pretty recent thing, because I remember writing about this particular taco. In fact, I can still smell the greasy odor of it. Then, I scrolled below to see where I had written "unfornately." And I did! I spelled the gawdforsaken word wrong! (Errors are still intact, uncorrected, as a reminder to myself of the atrocity I had committed.)

I have a flair for being melodramatic. So I was mortified. I was sad. I was mad. I was in a rage, then calmed down to clinical depression. All this in an hour or so. Then I returned to my normal "ce la vie" state, and realized that I can make errors. And I damn will make errors. Because I am human. To err is human. I make errors, therefore I am. It is, nevertheless, a humbling experience that I will remember for the next few months. It has also reminded me, even though it was a mere spelling error, that I need to hit the English (non-literary, extremely technical kind) books and freshen up on my grammar. There is a Korean saying: Even monkeys fall off of trees. So back on the tree I go.

So thank you, whomever you are, you who had searcheth the insane phrase "unfornately taco!"