Oh, and I just lurve being labelled female, too. That never makes me want to claw my own skin off or anything.

I think people interpreted your previous comment as “Why are you talking about this stupid bullshit?” not “Why do people even care, in the long run?”

but i DO think the grammar hangup is stupid, generally.

if what you’re saying is valuable it doesn’t matter what professional stamp of approval’s placed on it — be it king james english or street slang. degrees don’t matter either — so many institutions promote obedient mediocrity and conformist thinking.

it’s the content counts. and i apologize for morphing onto this darling personal tangent.

that said, rock on, sisters!

– “hello,” is correct.

– You do not need a comma in the “Zzz…” sentence because what follows the “but” is not an independent clause (i.e., it doesn’t have its own subject-verb combo; it just has the verb “heard,” the subject of which is “I” from the first half of the sentence. :-D

MLA plays winner, perhaps?

I’m gonna be over here on the sidelines, snapping my fingers and humming a tritone-based melody.

Here’s a sample sentence I constructed on the fly:

>> Saying “hello”, casually nodding your head, and complete silence are the only three permissible forms of interaction while at a bathroom urinal.

Now it would seem to me that “hello”, is correct rather than “hello,” just because you are isolating/highlighting a single token. Otherwise you would have parsing ambiguities – for a marginally absurd example let’s consider a movie that just opened called “Zzz…”

>> I haven’t seen the new movie “Zzz…,” but heard that it was quite good.

So now how does the reader tell if the movie is called “Zzz…” or “Zzz…,”? If I remember my grammar a comma is optional in the above sentence depending on your style guidelines.

I don’t think I can read her blog with any kind of respect anymore.