My Grammatical Foundations Have Been Slapped

I am UPSET.  I was taught, as I'm sure most of you were, that TWO SPACES after a period is the way to go with proper grammar.  Thus have have been perplexed in years to come when typing and "publishing" things on the internets and the two spaces are automatically reduced to one.  Why?  I asked myself.  Why would they take my immaculate grammar and make it horrible?  It drove me nuts!  I would go through emails and blog posts and facebook thingies and insert the second space, only to find that upon "publishing", the space was GONE!

Now, I find, after reading this post on the hilarious Hyperbole and a Half, that someone actually effing changed the rule.  WELL EFF YOU EFFERS I'M NOT GOING TO FOLLOW YOUR STUPID NEW EFFING RULE I WILL USE TWO SPACES UNTIL I DIE!!!

But I will probably stop going through things and trying to force the second space in there now.  Maybe instead I should learn computer programming and fix all the computers in the world so that they keep the double space, thus shoving it in the FACE of those douche-faces at MLA who just decided it would be fun to change the rule.  You can't just CHANGE grammar!  It's not RIGHT!  Next they're going to be all like "you know what?  A sentence can be comprised of all single letters and numbers that aren't words but are meant to represent other words.  That's cool by us."  y r u SO STUPID?

Note: I say "publishing" in judgmental quotation marks because it just feels wrong to call a blog comment, facebook status update, or tweet a publication.  Technically I guess it is because publishing can be defined as making your words available to the general public for consumption, but I guess I am just an elitist.  In fact, I balk every time I post something here and have to click the button that says "Publish Post."


Note Pt. II: I realize that these blog posts (I think) actually retain my double-spacing upon "publication", thus hindering my argument a little.  All I know is that many times I have typed things into little web "publishing" forms and then been horrified to see the butchered, single-spaced results.  Seriously, it doesn't make any sense.  The double space makes for a much more aesthetically pleasing and more organized-looking paragraph.  Don't you think?


Note Pt. III: Does anyone else who lives in BC feel weird about the fact that MLA both refers to the committee that chooses rules for grammar and citation (but only in certain fields of study) and to the massive jerks who run our province?


Note: Pt. IV: The use of the term "slapped" as opposed to "shaken" or "rocked" or any other commonly used term in relation to the harming of a foundational belief is in direct reference to the worst play I ever saw, a play I got the horrifying pleasure of seeing just a week ago.  In the playwright/director's notes in the program she specifies that the play "will slap your foundations."  That is a good indication of the quality of writing in the rest of the play.  Maybe I will write more about how terrible it was later.