Okay...

I had to pass English to graduate High School, so I assume everyone else did, too.

I'd be mistaken.

It seems that the use of contractions completely befuddles most of the public, so I'm going to let off a little steam about it. (...and NO, the contractions of which I speak are NOT labor pains, or for the less literate among you, legally binding agreements.)

A CONTRACTION is when you want to skip out on a few letters because you're too lazy to use all of the words. See, I just used one!

It's whenever you cram two words together SO HARD that letters pop out and are replaced with an apostrophe. You know the apostrophe, right? It looks like a comma that's high on something... but I digress.

Like "you are" becomes "you're" ... did you notice that the poor little 'a' popped out and got replaced by the high comma, er, apostrophe?

Do you get confused as to whether or not you are using the right syntax? (No, not the tax on cigarettes! That's a SIN tax!) Here's a simple rule. If you can un-cram the words and it still makes sense, you are on the right track... like the last sentence: "Here's a simple rule." Try "HERE IS a simple rule." Hmmm, still makes sense, right?

And now to my biggest pet peeve about contractions... "your" vs. "you're"...

Sometimes, I speak my mind. Sometimes, people don't like it. (See, it still makes sense if I had said "DO NOT like it"!) Then they call me crazy.

They say "Your crazy!"... to which I respond... "My crazy WHAT?!?... My crazy WHAT?!?!?" because YOUR implies OWNERSHIP. "YOUR panties are in a bunch", or "YOUR head is up your butt". Try the checking rule... if you could expand it to "YOU ARE crazy!" and it makes sense, then it should have the apostrophe in it, making it "You're crazy!" to which I respond... "So what's your point?" I'd rather sound insane than inane, but I digress again.

And now to a tricky one... "their" vs. "they're" vs. "there"...

"There" is a location... "Their" is ownership by THEM... and "They're" is a contraction of "THEY ARE"... get it?

Correct grammar would be "There lies the one with whom they're upset, which explains their anger."

Learned them yet? Here's another one for the southern folks... ever wonder where the word "y'all" comes from? You guessed it, a CONTRACTION! It's a cram-together of "YOU ALL" (which is really bad grammar, by the way... you should say "EVERYONE" in that example) which pops out the "ou" and becomes y'all. That's why Texans say "y'all" instead of "you all" because we won't have ANYTHING to do with "OU"... but I trigress. (Third time... for those MENSA members in the audience.)

So...

Please learn to speak, or at least TYPE English, correctly.

...and NO, I ain't an English major!