When I traveled to Italy and Brasil, I was told learning English was the hardest language to learn. I have discovered as I teach my daughter how to read and write English it is a very hard language to learn. One part of the English language that baffles my mind is who gets to decide what rules are used and what new rules can be created. When thinking about what grammar rules bother me the most, I thought of two things I don’t really like.

The first one is the comma. After doing some research about the comma, which I might add was not really that much fun. The general rule for a comma is, put a comma in where ever you take a breath. Really!?!?! Well who’s breath are we talking about? A male breath? A female breath? I mean some people have a bigger lung capacity than others. What about the guy who use to be on the Micro Machine commercials. He never took a breath. When he writes can he totally skip using the comma? But when and if you are doing some writing for journalism you can skip using the comma because you try and save some space whenever you can. I actually found a website that gives 10 rules to follow when using a comma. WOW that is a lot of rules for a piece of punctuation that is almost as small as a period. The period is for ending a complete thought. Pretty simple. This same website also listed 10 reasons why you should know how to use a comma. It’s cool to use the comma.

My final grammar rule that really irritates me is when you can have a word be spelled exactly the same and have two different meanings. This word is called a homonym. An example of this I found was the word “bow.” I hope you can keep up as I share the definitions for the word spelled exactly the same, bow.

1. A long wooden stick with horse hair used to play certain instruments
2. To bend forward at the waist in respect
3. The front of the ship
4. The weapon that shoots arrows
5. A kind of tied ribbon
6. To bend outward at the sides

Let’s think about this. The stone age men created the bow to get some food which most likely happened before people were bowing to each other. So when the first person bend forward at the waist in respect and most likely had used a bow before the bending at the waist, why would they call that a bow? Can’t they think of calling a bow something else? And then who got rich from creating the word homonym because we have 6 definitions for certain words? Well anyway I hope you got my point.

I must say I am very excited to read about what grammar rules bother others. I’m hoping to create my own word some day and make millions but may just decided to use a word already in use with my own definition.