Who are you staying by? Who do you hold by?

As many of you know, my typos, grammar mistakes, general lack of writing skills can sometimes make my posts hard to read. It’s mostly out of laziness and a lack of willingness to proofread and get a good editor to stick with me for the long run. If you look at the blog from a macro perspective, my writing style has changed and vastly improved through the years. Whenever I look back at old posts from the shtetl years of 06-08, I cringe and always wonder how people could actually read and comprehend what I was trying to say. Sometimes I get frantic calls and texts from the wife, wondering why I didn’t wait for her to look at it and make sure it didn’t sound like a 10th grader was writing it. For all of my grammar mishaps and critics telling me how bad my English was and still is, I never really knew and wasn’t ever told that my lifetime usage of the word “by” was wrong.

I swear that until moving to the West Coast, I never heard anyone say something or roll their eyes when I used the word “by” when it shouldn’t have been used. The first time some smart-ass BT corrected me when I asked them who they were eating by, they told me it should be “at”, that didn’t flow and I just ignored them. Until recently, frummies could have free reign of their bad English. We could just say what we wanted and not get poked and prodded like a bunch of cattle stepping out of line, I’m not sure what happened, but I’ve noticed a spike in the criticism surrounding the usage of “by” and other normal ways that frum people speak.

For the record, I stay true to my roots and use bad English or the Yiddish-English way of saying some things. I only know this, because my dear wife points it out every time I do it. Apparently I speak more Yinglishly than I previously thought. I’m not sure, why every BT, OTD and trying to look educated Touro guy is jumping down the backs of the “where are you staying by?” crowd, but I felt it my duty to say that I don’t hold of it.

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