Hold your tongue. Check. Speak.

Once upon a time there was a girl in my class, whom I took an instant dislike to. Don’t know if the root of that antipathy stemmed in my own misjudgement or if the girl really was a hypocritical twat (oh my, I just used a bad word that refers to genitalia! Well well, these words are reserved for the really mean people).
We are talking about a person who liked telling the rest of the world about her bright future at Oxbridge*: apparently that’s where people with such amazing English skills as hers automatically ended up back in the day (quite a bold statement from a 15-year-old). She also seemed to think that William the Conqueror was a happy-go-lucky sorta lad who preferred to show to the Londoners what a strange army he had. Strange. Strong. Strength. Same thing. I wonder how the kind history lecturers at Oxbridge would have welcomed this bold statement?
I’m not telling this story because I think that this girl deserves to be laughed at for a mistake she made over ten years ago. No, I want to mention her because she, like so many others, break what I call the golden rules of language learning (they can be applied to real life too, by the way). Yeah, I laughed at her, and it probably gained me a bit more time on this planet. Not because she made a simple mistake, but because she was so sure that she was the best and the prettiest, and that she’d never get anything wrong. Well, guess what...

• Never, ever think you’re perfect. Not only do you place yourself above everyone else (which is not a very stylish thing to do), but you also impede your own improvement. And. There is always room for improvement.
• If you’re not 100% sure: hold your tongue, check it up, and then speak/write/communicate. That’s the way you learn, and people might think you are quite clever after all.
• Everybody makes mistakes, and there is nothing wrong with that. But: the point is to learn from those very same mistakes. And learning is a long process that takes a lot of patience and modesty.
• Not using all the tools (dictionaries, spell checkers, horrendous google translate**) that we have at our disposal is just pure laziness.

Yes, I admit. I’m one of those annoying people who are really picky about spelling and such things (although I’m sure I commit those very same crimes myself), but to tell you the truth: why would you publically want to look like an idiot? Mistakes are OK, but why on earth do you keep repeating them? That’s the idiotic part. It’s amazing how badly people write these days, and there is absolutely no valid excuse unless they all suffer from dyslexia (which is unlikely since it "affects between 5 and 17 percent of the population.".) The internet is full of dictionaries and thesauri. Spell checkers are good, too. Unfortunately they tell you little about grammar, but hey, not everything comes for free in life.

Yours sincerely,
the pedantic granny who left unfinished sentences in her BA dissertation. (but hey, it’s ok, since it wasn’t written in her mother tongue anyway).

* No, according to Facebook she never studied at fancy Oxbridge.
**In order to use Google Translate you really need to know the language you’re translating into, at least well enough to recognise all the stupid mistakes the translation tool makes. If you use copy paste, you’ll definitely end up looking like an idiot.