I am a Grammar Nazi.\u00a0 This mostly means I get frustrated a lot as most of my friends are online and many of them either don’t know or don’t care to demonstrate they know the difference, for example, between “your” and “you’re” or maybe “there”, “their” and “they’re”, etc.\u00a0 Many won’t even abbreviate “etc.” correctly.<\/p>\n
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I mention this today because yesterday was one of those days so many Americans do their best to screw up grammatically.\u00a0 Specifically by celebrating the “fourth of July”.\u00a0 I have news for the folks that do this:\u00a0 Every country has fourth of July.\u00a0 And a fifth, and a sixth, etc.\u00a0 The holiday’s actual name is Independence Day.\u00a0 Many countries have one of those, too, but at least it’s not a generic calendar date.<\/p>\n
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It goes a bit beyond that, too.\u00a0 One of the traditions of the holiday is to shoot off fireworks.\u00a0 This is all well and good (and dangerous in many cases), but folks start shooting off the fireworks in early June and don’t stop until early August.\u00a0 This might be a bit more historically accurate, after a fashion, as the Declaration of Independence, the document truly being celebrated, was probably authored in June and most historians agree the final signatures were put on it on August 2, 1776.<\/p>\n
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Of course, we’re getting into semantics here.\u00a0 The Declaration meant very little immediately.\u00a0 It mostly meant a few rebels wanted to be free of British rule.\u00a0 There were still a lot of people loyal to the English crown living in the colonies, and the war for American Independence had barely begun.\u00a0 We didn’t have our first president for thirteen years; Washington was elected in 1789.\u00a0 July 4 was the official date of approval for the Declaration, but actual independence took some years to achieve.<\/p>\n
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If all this sounds like a mild rant, I apologize.\u00a0 I meant to make a rant of it and the abuses some people make of the day yesterday, but, well, I had a weird schedule yesterday thanks to the holiday and things did not go as planned.\u00a0 For those of you outside the U.S., suffice to say the holiday is, as I am sure such holidays tend to be, a bit insane.\u00a0 I’ll leave it at that with one more thing:<\/p>\n
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Happy Birthday, U.S. of A!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am a Grammar Nazi.\u00a0 This mostly means I get frustrated a lot as most of my friends are online and many of them either don’t know or don’t care to demonstrate they know the difference, for example, between “your” and “you’re” or maybe “there”, “their” and “they’re”, etc.\u00a0 Many won’t even abbreviate “etc.” correctly. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":580,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions\/580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}