Friend or Foe

I was watching some kids build sand castles together on the beach over the weekend, and I got all nostalgic about how nice it was being a kid when friendships were so simple. I started thinking back to my childhood friendships, and I realized something: the course of true friendship never did run smooth. I specifically remember talking shit behind a friend’s back as early as the third grade.

One woman who has had a particularly difficult time maintaining friendships is Paris Hilton. She has feuded with Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, and most famously, Nicole Richie.

I am actually surprised that Paris has experienced so much friend drama because she is the only person I have heard of who has a system in place to test whether or not potential friends have her best interest at heart. Here’s what she does:

"I have this great test to see if a girl's a real friend. When we're shopping I'll pick out an outfit that I know looks hot and one that is awful. If my friend says the bad one looks good, I know she's not a good friend."

Now that I think about it, I can see how this backfired; there is one major flaw in her logic. This is what she thinks is hot:

I’m afraid she may have mistakenly written off a lot of potential friends who did, in fact, have her best interest at heart by suggesting that she perhaps choose a dress that's not held together by safety pins or that perchance she try a thinner belt or that she may want to seriously consider an accessories reduction.

The moral of the story: unless you have a pretty strong grasp of the subject at hand, you may not know whether the advice you are receiving is valid or not.

This is the problem I have with Microsoft Word’s Grammar Checker and other grammar checking software. Much of the advice they give is misleading or confusing if you don’t already have a fairly sophisticated understanding of grammar.

Blindly trusting Grammar Checker can be dangerous because sometimes it actually gives the wrong advice, or it recommends a sentence that is technically correct but doesn’t quite capture the tone of the writing. And recently, one of my colleagues and I trialed this new grammar software called Grammarly.com. Like Grammar Checker, some of its suggestions were also flat out incorrect, and because its explanations require its users to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of grammar concepts and jargon, I'm not sure it will be helpful to those who aren't grammar savvy.

Do you agree? Are the existing grammar checkers too sophisticated for grammar neophytes? Or am I just talking shit again?