(Set in the 2010's, idk when exactly)

The Kollok Radar group chat. A wholesome place. Although... there was one flaw. Here is a conversation:

Skye!: waddup!!!

Tibby: hi skye!!

Mallory: hello skye, how are u?

Skye!: shut up

Mallory: you're saying that to who?

Skye!: you

Mallory: ok

Billy: i'm here twoooo

Mickey: Billy, it's too, not two

Billy: ok grammar nazi

Mickey: oh frick off

Billy: eheheheh

Tibby: billy u better be respecting my girlfriend

EmPegg: guys stop i'm workingggg

Billy: sorry lol

Laura: my phone keeps buzzing wut we talkin about

Skye!: idk some gr8 shit?

Mallory: mickey's a grammar nazi

Laura: is that literally it?

Mallory: thats all that's interesting

EmPegg: guys Cheese just dropped like a whole bunch of movies he was taking to the shelves lmao

Billy: he wot m8?

EmPegg: he's panicing now it's hilarious

Laura: wish i was there :(

Mickey: your misspellings are upsetting me greatly

Tibby: sorry babe

Mickey: I will shove a stick up your ass if you call me 'babe' one more time

Tibby: sorry

EmPegg: Cheese tried picking the movies up and started going through them all and broke one of its cases lmfao

Mallory: he's dumber than me

Skye!: no u'd probably burn the place down.

Mallory: IF I CAN RUN A TACO BELL, I CAN RUN A VIDEO STORE

Mickey: and I can run a grammar lesson, bitches.

Laura: huh?

Mickey: come to my apartment, 4pm. I will teach you proper English because as an author, your horrible spelling and grammar are pissing me off.

Skye!: dude chill its a text chat

Mickey: you're acting like you haven't emailed me with horrible English or written stories and shown me them without editing the spelling and grammar AT ALL. We're fixing this. If you don't come I'll drag you here myself.

Now, Mickey actually has money in this universe (because she's an author even though she's a teen and her books make money), so she connected her laptop to her TV with a PowerPoint presentation ready to go. 

She took a deep breath.

There was a knock at the door.

"Okay losers," Mickey began once all the Radar had arrived, "this shouldn't be happening. But it is. I'm going to test you all on spelling and grammar, and teach you the proper ways."

"Okay...?" Billy arched an eyebrow.

Mickey smiled and went to the next slide on her PowerPoint. The word "it's" was on the screen. "What is the term for this word?" Mickey asked.

Em Pegg raised her hand. "English," she smiled.

"No. Well, yes, it's English, but what is it called when you shorten a word by taking out a letter and replacing it with an apostrophe?"

"Contraction."

"Yes, thank you. Now this contraction is an interesting one, as it's used for both a short term for 'it is' and in saying something possesses another thing, for example 'its pencil is sharp'. If the name or pronoun of whomever this thing belongs to is unknown, it's referred to as an 'it'."

Mallory raised his hand. "I don't get it," he said.

Mickey sighed. "Okay, we'll come back to that."

She skipped ahead a few slides on her PowerPoint. "Homophones and homographs. Homophones are words that sound the same, but have a different spelling and meaning. Homographs are words that are spelled the same, but have different sounds and meanings."

Mallory raised his hand again. "We know this," he moaned. "Can we skip to something else?"

Billy raised his hand also. "I'm bored," he complained. "Is this nearly done?"

"Actually, it's 'is this nearly over'. And no, it isn't. If you complain again, I'll keep you in at recess."

"No! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

"Good. Now—"

"This is an interesting lesson, Billy," Skye frowned.

"Yeah! Mickey's the best teacher!" Tibby exclaimed.

"I'm sorry we're not interested," Mallory crossed his arms and pouted.

Mickey began tapping her foot on the ground. Her patience was wearing thin. Laura noticed this. "If Mickey's the best teacher, then let her freaking teach," she growled.

But no-one listened. 

"You two need the education," Em chuckled, her eyes darting from Billy to Mallory, Billy to Mallory. "You have TERRIBLE English."

"We ALL do, that's why we're here," Tibby pointed out.

"Oh yeah."

"Who cares if I can't English?" Billy spat. "I'll live!"

"People online will keep picking on you for your horribly worded Tweets," Laura said.

"Well screw them! I'm fine without English!"

"Yeah! Shut up, guys!" Mallory hissed.

Mallory, Billy, Skye, Em, Laura and Tibby all continued to argue. Mickey stared in frustration. Her friends needed help, yet they weren't letting her in to provide that help. Despite her best efforts to calm everyone, they only got louder and angrier at each other. Then the idea popped into her head.

Mickey snuck to her room, bringing out her Bluetooth speakers. "I didn't want to do this," she muttered on her way back down the hallway, "but you've left me no choice."

She placed the speaker down next to the TV. Her friends didn't notice still. 

Mickey then went and found the various horribly-worded emails and group chats on her laptop to complain about and teach by. She grabbed her phone off the kitchen table, and a small chime came when it connected to the speaker. 

Mickey went through YouTube, finding the instrumental to just the song she wanted. And she pressed play. 

"Everybody shut up, woo!
Everyone listen up!
Hey, hey, hey, uh
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey!" Mickey started the Weird Al song 'Word Crimes'.

Everyone went quiet.

"If you can't write in the proper way, if you don't know how to conjugate...Maybe you flunked that class, and maybe now you find that people mock you online. Okay, now here's the deal I'll try to educate ya!
Gonna familiarise you with the nomenclature. Y ou'll learn the definitions of nouns and prepositions. Literacy's your mission, and that's why I think it's a good time! To learn some grammar."

"Wut?" Skye asked.

"Now, did I stammer? Work on that grammar.
You should know when it's "less" or it's "fewer". Like people who were never raised in a sewer. I hate these word crimes! 'Like I could care less'. That means you do care. At least a little.
Don't be a moron! You'd better slow down, and use the right pronoun, show the world you're no clown. 

Everybody wise up!

Say you got an "I", "T", followed by apostrophe, "s". Now what does that mean? You would not use "it's" in this case! As a possessive? No, no, no. It's a contraction. Yeah, yeah, yeah! What's a contraction? Well, it's the shortening of a word, or a group of words by the omission of a sound or letter. 

Okay, now here's some notes. Syntax you're always mangling. No "x" in "espresso", Your participle's danglin'. But I don't want your drama. If you really wanna leave out that Oxford comma, just keep in mind that "be", "see", "are", "you" are words, not letters. Get it together. Use your spellchecker. You should never write words using numbers, unless you're seven. Or your name is Prince. 

I hate these word crimes! You really need a full-time proofreader, you dumb mouth-breather. Well, you should hire some cunning linguist to help you distinguish what is proper English.

One thing I ask of you time to learn your homophones is past due. Learn to diagram a sentence too, always say "to whom", don't ever say "to who". 

And listen up when I tell you this: I hope you never use quotation marks for emphasis. You finished second grade, I hope you can tell if you're doing good or doing well. 

You better figure out the difference: irony is not coincidence. And I thought that you'd gotten it through your skull what's figurative and what's literal. Oh but, just now, you said, you literally couldn't get out of bed. That really makes me want to literally smack a crowbar upside your stupid head!

I read your e-mail. It's quite apparent; your grammar's errant. You're incoherent. Saw your blog post! It's really fantastic! That was sarcastic (Oh, psych!) 'Cause you write like a spastic. I hate these Word Crimes! Your prose is dopey. Think you should only write in emoji. Oh, you're a lost cause! Go back to pre-school. Get out of the gene pool. Try your best to not drool."

"No," Mallory frowned.

"What are we talking about?" Em asked.

Mickey groaned. "Never mind I give up. Really, now I give up. Here's some homework," she continued singing, throwing papers at her friends. "Go Away!"

The next night, Mickey was grading her students' papers. Laura and Tibby both did perfectly, 100%. Em Pegg was on a 90%, Skye 85%, Billy way down at 69%, and Mallory at 58%. At least a couple people caught on. She jumped onto the group chat to see if anything had changed. Much to her dismay, the terrible English was only stopped by Laura and Tibby, her two best students. "I hate my life," Mickey grumbled, letting her head fall onto her desk.

Here's to putting a stop to terrible grammar.

(YGS every Friday...)

(Jacksfilms reference 😎)

Ok that's all bye.