Rude and tactless? Yes, but...

Sep 14, 2010

A question occurred to me today as I was telling a friend about recent nonsense I've encountered here... Is a man's rude, tactless comment about my boobs the same as my rude, tactless comment about some guy's horrible grammar/spelling?

I've ranted here before about douchebag guys thinking they can just burst into a conversation about my boobs. I had another one on IM last night: "Hi, wow--those are huge." Yes, that was basically it. Lame and unoriginal and therefore ignored. Anyway, yesterday (or maybe the day before) I got a message from a guy with horrible grammar and spelling, I'd actually seen his profile first on QuickMatch, it was full of errors too and he promptly got a 1-star rating.

The message was nice enough but I think it's clear if you read my profile that proper writing is important to me. He said his profile wasn't filled out as much as mine because he figured he'd leave something to talk about with a girl, to get to know each other. He said I seemed interesting and would like to talk, blah blah blah.  My response? Well, it wasn't nice to be sure. Something to the effect of "Don't expect to get to know anyone until you learn to write properly. Every time you just wrote the word "your" you meant "you're" and I can't have a conversation with someone too lazy or too stupid to know the difference."  Harsh, I know, but he did it repeatedly. At 34 years old you should know simple, basic grammar. 

You don't have to have a snooty college level vocabulary, I surely don't, but not grasping BASIC grammar is inexcusable. Everyone typos, it happens, sometimes I might type "your" instead of "you're" if my brain is getting ahead of my fingers, but in this environment you have the time to reread and correct, so do it.

So, he called me rude or something and said he wasn't lazy or stupid, there might have been something about my high horse... I skimmed it and deleted. I should have asked him what his excuse was, if not stupidity or laziness, since those are the only two I can think of.

But back to my original question, does it fall on the same level of rude and tactless? Because I don't think it does.