I'm Big in New Zealand

As part of a recent forum topic, I was doing a couple of Google searches on myself. My real name is fairly common, it seems, so I decided to look it up based on the nickname I commonly use: "Sxeptomaniac". The name is, so far, unique to me, but among the expected results, I got a bit of a surprise. It seems a columnist for the New Zealand Herald found some of my words worth quoting in an opinion piece about relaxed grammar and spelling online. I'm quoted right at the end of the piece:

While I was surfing the net, looking for English language massacres on message boards (they're there and simply too numerous to list), I found a great debate going on between Geek Culture forum members who were taking a new member to task for failing to use basic grammar and correct spelling in his postings.

Sxeptomaniac put it best: "Spelling and grammar are about organising your thoughts in ways that will make sense to others without requiring them to consciously work at it. That's why lack of grammar and spelling is seen as rude here; you're asking us to expend extra effort to read your posts, because you were too lazy to expend that effort yourself when typing them."

Couldn't have put it better myself.

It's pretty fun to find how a little comment of mine ended up in a newspaper all the way across the Pacific.

Of course, the part of me that is quite anal about my writing can't help but think how my wording could have been just a little bit better.