As a first time mother (yes, I realize my son is nearly two now, but this still counts as the first time), I read a lot of information on the internet about child-rearing and what-not. These days I typically avoid the group boards or forums as most of them are, in my opinion, a forum for every extreme person to air their extreme opinions. There are occasionally nuggets of good information buried beneath hysteria and outrage, but you really have to have a fair amount of patience to get to it. I do not have this type of patience anymore, other types of patience (like the patience to pick up the all the fridge magnets off the floor for the 14th time in one day) I have plenty of.
Occasionally I have an issue that I can’t ask all the reasonable people I know about, due to its obscurity or sometimes my embarrassment, and I am forced to turn to the internet for answers. Usually I try to scan all the opinions for the pertinent information, reading just enough to find out what I need. Unfortunately, reading “just enough” also means I actually have to read some pretty stupid stuff. That’s right, I said stupid, and I meant it.
This leads to my pet peeves:
If you have some extreme opinion and you are vehemently disagreeing with someone on a message board, I would assume you would like to be taken seriously. SO WHEN YOU WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, NO ONE IS GOING TO TAKE YOU SERIOUSLY. You are doing the equivalent of screaming. I’m going to skip your post.
If you are telling someone to do something, please do not address me as U, as in “its so much better for the lo if u only feed him strained beets with a turkey baster” (also notice the other grammatical error and the use of obscure slang—“lo” means “little one”). I am definitely going to discount your opinion if YOU can’t take the time to type out a couple extra letters.
If you use extreme hyperbole in your post, some unfortunate person is going to take you seriously, so please don’t do this. Writing a post explaining that feeding your infant formula is the equivalent of feeding her a combination of heroin and rat poison is going to scare the crap out of someone. Most intelligent people will choose to ignore you, but someone out there is going to take you seriously, buying into your post of fear, and will instead not feed their child rather than risk giving them rat poison. Not cool.
Ok, rant over.
For all of my grammar loving, intelligent friends and readers here is a post from Hyperbole and a Half that is genius: The Alot.
If you think this is funny, you’ll totally be excited to find out my lovely and funny little sister gave me a t-shirt for Christmas that says “I love this Alot” and shows a girl hugging her friendly Alot monster. yay! Be jealous. It’s rad.