Testing My Patience

I was just reading a blog post on a travel blog, written by an English teacher who believes in lots of travel so he will have interesting anecdotes and information to share with his students to encourage them to write. Perhaps your first reaction is "Man, I wish that guy taught my student!" or "What an inspiring teacher!"

My reaction? Well. He used the phrase "...test my medal..."

And I immediately lost all respect for him. Especially as an English teacher. Because the correct expression is (and I'm SURE you knew this) "test my mettle."

As soon as I read it, I thought hmmmm...isn't that supposed to be...and I checked with my BFF Google and, sure enough, I was right.

This sort of thing makes me crazy. I am positively ANAL about making sure my spelling and grammar are correct on my blogs. I don't always succeed as my proof-reading sister will attest and I bless her for emailing me my mistakes because I instantly go back and fix them.

I will sometimes email a blog writer and offer a correction but not often. You just don't know how something like that will be received. I have done it and been thanked but I have done it and never heard back. They were probably too angry and cursing too loudly at the UNMITIGATED GALL of this person who dared to correct them. So I usually ignore it.

What about you?

And I realize it is at this point that I will make some glaring mistake on one of my posts and everyone who read this will be snickering and pointing. Such is life.

Updated just to show what happens when you get too full of yourself: A comment from Maggie: This is from an old English teacher. You have a punctuation error here: "test my mettle".
The quotation mark should be outside the period. Quotation marks always go outside a period or a comma. J

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp