About

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

– Arthur Polotnik

If you’re like me, you shudder when you see a mistake in a newspaper or a misprint in a book. You hate when people say “could care less” when they mean “couldn’t care less.” You know that I was correct to put the period within the closing quotation mark in the previous sentence.

This blog is for all of you word junkies out there.

It’s not meant to be a formal place — just somewhere I can rant about the issues I have with the state of the English language; a place free of texting, short forms, and emoticons. Because as much as most of us use those in our day-to-day lives, they really are killing the beauty of our language. They’re ruining future generations who no longer recognize the difference between your and you’re.

Atrocities such as these should not go unnoticed. We, the word junkies of the world, need to stand together and fight to keep our language intact!

I encourage you to become a word junkie. I hope to inspire you to love language the way I do, perhaps to teach you every once in a while, and to learn from you as well. Not to mention all the fun we can have laughing at the silly mistakes that make it into print.

Cheryl Mascarenhas

Editor, writer, and word junkie