July 14, 2016

It must have been just barely a week ago that my son started obsessing about Pokémon Go (side note, I am really disturbed that the word processing part of my blog site automatically adds the accent mark over the "e"). Of course, in a world where meteoric rise of fads can occur almost instantaneously, I have gone in that short span of time from knowing nothing about Pokémon Go to knowing more than I want to know (and, yes, I have a couple of faculty I can also blame for that, but I will be nice and not name them here).

I think more than anything else, I am frustrated that fads like this can't come with a more educational value.  Yes, my son is out walking around a lot more than he has been, but ultimately to do nothing more than launch imaginary balls at imaginary creatures.

If I had an ounce of talent in app development, I would have beat Pokémon Go to the punch with Pococurante No! (By the way, I was pretty sure I would go through life without ever finding a natural, or semi-natural, way to use "pococurante," which means careless, and even more accurately an indifferent, careless person, but cross that off my f*ck it list.)

As I get older, and have more tendency, along with yelling to kids to "get off my lawn!" (as they look for their stupid Poopechus), to lose patience with sloppiness in public life, I mostly fear that typos, grammatical errors, poor writing, are just another sign of the decline of western civilization.  Thus, an app such as "Pococurante No!" would use a GPS/Google Earth system to send people to places where sloppy writing is evident and be asked to fix the error. 

Come to think of it, that is probably too esoteric, probably too boring. Maybe the gamer simply publicly shames. Instead of hurling balls, players hurl insults. Sometimes I think the Puritans may have been onto something.

See what I mean below (click on the links to see the specific examples).

"Don't know how to spell excellence, you ignorant bastard!" 

"You're an Idiot! And that's how you spell it!"

"While on one hand I like the idea, on the other hand, don't use polysyllabic words if you don't know them."

"As the Cowboy Junkies sing, "Irony, oh irony, you are a bitter fruit to eat."

"If you can't do simple plurals, don't reproduce and make more of yourself."

"I see the NRA's Clear Writing Squad has already been here."

"Hugh Grant is British, you moron!"

This idea seems like a can't miss opportunity.  More people, especially kids, out walking.  More people caring about accuracy of language. Being a grammar Nazi is all of a sudden a cool thing.  Sloppiness being recognized as a sign of our decaying society. What could go wrong?

Hmm?  All of a sudden I am picturing a logjam of people in a place where stupidity and sloppiness runneth over.  There's probably already enough people at a Trump rally.