Woe Is I for Finishing this Book

I’m starting to get depressed every Sunday when I finish a book. Wait a minute, that’s not even close to the truth. I’m actually pretty happy when I finish a book, but I thought I’d sound cooler if I said I was depressed. Wow, I have issues. Thinking being depressed is cool is like thinking it’s cool to watch Battlestar Galactica (which, for the record, I do). Anyway, I have finished Woe Is I and I must say that it was delightful.

But, before I give a summary of the book, let’s talk about one of its chapter’s titles: “Metaphors Be with You.” hahahha, I could not stop laughing when I read that. If you don’t get the joke then you haven’t watched enough Star Wars. As you probably guessed, this was the chapter on metaphors. The chapter itself was good, but the title was priceless. I could have spent years and not come up with a pun that good. My hat’s off to you Mrs. O’Conner. <begin slow clap>

There were two things that I was happy to learn through the last 75 pages of the book.

1. It’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition.
2. It’s okay to start a sentence with and or but.

I’m sure grammar dorks (people even dorkier than me) could argue about this for years, but I’m going to take the author’s word for it and high five myself for all the times I started a sentence with and or but. (That means I get three high fives for this post alone.)

Getting back to the book, it was good and I recommend it. (I’m now convinced that people don’t read this blog for the book reviews). I thought that it would make me some grand master of grammar who kicked grammar butt and took names. I imagined myself saying stuff like, “I’m here to kick grammar ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all out of bubblegum,” but, quite honestly, that never happened. I also thought I might get a tattoo with something like, “i before e, except after c,” or ,”I’m the comma sutra.” But, that didn’t happen either. I guess I’m much less extreme than I’d like. Instead, I mentioned the book to a few friends, and became much less anal about grammar. One of these days I’ll become the Jack Bauer of grammar, but for now I’ll just read silently and politely. (Oh no, Woe Is I would be mad at me for saying that I read politely because it doesn’t make any sense. But, I don’t like using the delete key so I’m just going to leave that sentence. Look at me, I’m finally being a rebel.)