My crack-of-dawn ramblings led me to a cool quiz this morning. How well do you know the language you speak? To find out, take Encarta’s Evil Word-Twin Quiz. Of course, Yours Truly scored 100%, but that’s not because I’m fabulous. It’s because I’m geeky about that stuff. Trust me, I ain’t no Poindexter. I know when to use complement over compliment, but, for instance, don’t ask me to solve for X.

Why is the English language so ridiculously difficult? I mean, take the sentence: They’re there, over there with their belongings. ???????? What, the English founding fathers couldn’t find enough words to describe stuff? Think of how many homophones there are in silly English…

• heir, air
• deer, dear
• marshal, martial

The list goes on and on and on and on. Anyway, I’ll quit to avoid another rant.

Ok, one more thing. This bugs me. People need to stop apostrophe abuse. It’s completely out of hand. More on that later….

Rat (please use apostrophes to indicate possession/contraction and NOT number) Fink