Language: An art or an obsession

It’s not about just the words anymore

“You want a love that consumes you. You want passion and adventure and maybe even a little danger”        - Damon Salvatore, the Vampire Diaries (Season 3 episode 22)

I would be lying if I said that I am a 10/10 when it comes to the mother of all languages, English Language. But I would say that I surely have a strong command over it. Lord knows I have poured down innumerable grief upon grief on several people’s lack of correct use of grammar, pronunciation, enunciation and basically for the way they bug the living hell out of me when they complicate something as simple and elegant as MY and mangle and combine it to a Mah (I suppose its My+Ma+H=MAH! Seriously! Even modern dictionaries can’t fathom how our new generation has turned a two syllable word into a three headed monster of a word).

Learning a language is like an art. Some might even call it rocket science. I am referring to the lack of French-ness in me. Not that the language does not turn me into a mush because it so totally does, but it might take another 20 years before I even begin to think beyond Bonjour, Je m’applle and Ooo! I have come as far as enchante de votre conaissaince.

 *Super proud*

Coming to the point, you find something creative everyday out of every single syllable. It’s an unbounded ocean of learning, practicing and learning again. You continue to grow and it continues to grow with you and on you.

Lord knows I suffer from an all consuming love for English Language or in a doctor’s way of putting my case, an OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). One grammatical error is all it takes to send me spiraling down to a self made island of purgatory, haunting me, taunting me incessantly, sometimes even for days and months if I am too bored, that devil of subconscious tormenting me until I begin to amend the errors (sometimes I absolutely loathe that voice inside my head). As a matter of fact there are times when I wake up at some ungodly hour and start sifting through, looking for mistakes, mine’s or somebody else’s and then set myself up on some crazy mind numbing mission of retouching and polishing it until it starts to shine, until I break my spine and until I lose my mind. A Grammar Nazi indeed.

In fact there was this incident once where I got blocked by 5 facebook users because well:

 1.       They were putting their nose where they had no business.

2.      Well the last and most important reason. I corrected their language and copy pasted the entire chat and threw it back on their faces gently explaining to them that this is how one should talk in English because a) they were bugging me with their bad grammar and 2) well it was plain fun and I found the perfect way to one up them.

To this day, I still wonder sometimes whether I should be proud or concerned. My kind would call it passion; the normal kind would call it an unhealthy obsession. Though now I know why my bondhus call me the Crazy Nazi.