Welcome to my first Truth Tuesday! Each Tuesday I have dedicated to telling the truth about something as I see it, be it current events, something I’ve noticed or something that just plain annoys me. Sometimes when I straddle that high horse of mine I have an uncontrollable urge to vomit words – so in an effort to harness that (look, I managed to continue with a horsey analogy!) and use it for a bit of writing practice, Truth Tuesday was born.

Today’s topic is ‘have’ versus ‘of’. I don’t think either of these words needs any introduction, after all they are some of the very first words we learn when we begin school. It is probably because of this fact that when people confuse the two and write ‘of’ instead of ‘have’ in their sentences the desire to kick something into their face becomes very strong. This just isn’t a word confusion that I can forgive.

Seeing someone write “I should of done… I could of but… I would of if…” etc, is like dousing me with icy cold water at 3am, force feeding me acid* and then turning on a multicoloured strobe light. I go a bit insane. You don’t see people writing “I of a wonderful piece of news” or “I of a sore leg” now do you? No, that’s ridiculous. You would be laughed out of town for being a simpleton.

It’s even worse when the perpetrator happens to be someone I see as intelligent and educated. They drop the wrong word and BAM! instantly they start freefalling on my respect-o-meter. If they pick up on it and correct themselves, no harm done, but if they don’t…. it’s hard to claw your way back up out of that particular hole I’m afraid.

The ABSOLUTE worst offenders though are my friends who are in fact primary school teachers themselves. I realise that in this modern age of text messages, IMs and Facebook we’re all as a society used to just talking with our fingers without filters, but for goodness sake! You’re a professional! How can I trust that you are capable of teaching children correctly when your Facebook status updates and comments are an indecipherable mess of lower case letters, random punctuation, misspelled and misused words? HOW CAN I TRUST YOU?

In short, if you make this mistake around me you better damn well fix it – or next time I see you, wear shin guards.

*Disclaimer: I have never, nor will I ever, take acid (my dad reads this).