I can't stand it anymore. I almost did not graduate high school because I did not do well in English class. If it was not for shop classes and auto shop I'd be living life with a G.E.D.

There are a lot of people here who I consider to be excellent writers and, I'm sorry, but it burns me to see how many people can't grasped the differences and proper usage of these three words.

You can cop an attitude. You can vote me down. You can tell me to take a hike. You can tell me I have an attitude and you can give me the middle finger salute. Or maybe, you can come out on the other side and know the difference. And no, I am not an English teacher. And I am certainly no oracle.

Even your iPhone can get this right when you are speaking to it. I would imagine Android with do what follows, as well. But I don't know.

Here we go:

"They're" is a contraction of "they are".

"Their" shows possession and/or ownership.

"There" is the location of what ever is being talked about.

If you speak the following words into your iPhone your iPhone will make the distinction and get it right. Every time.

Try it" "They're going to park their car over there."

"They're going to get their asses kicked if they park their car in my driveway instead of parking it over there in their driveway".

There are a lot of new people in the pinball hobby and they're going to be taken advantage of and will wind up paying too much for their "new" pinball machine. And when it breaks they're going to shove in the corner over there where it will be out of the way.

No, officer, that is not my car parked over there illegally. It is their car and they're going to have to move it if you want it out of your way.

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OK. There you go. You can flame me all you want. But if one person reads this and the light bulb clicks on in their head about how this "they're-their-there shit works, I will have considered this whiny post a success.

Thank you.

No. It is not that. We post stuff on the fly around here. I do, anyway. I leave out words. I try to not leave out periods or make other punctuation errors . etc. First, thanks to whoever invented spellchecker or I would be hosed. This is not about spelling inside the English language. It is not about punctuation. It is not about syntax. It is not about grammar. It is about three words.

As I said, there are some people here who I think are very good writers. They write in ways that make me wish I could write better. It's like I can't write that way but I recognize excellence when I see it. And I was reading one of these excellent posts last night. Everything was perfect. Except this writer always has problems with "their and there" and crisscrossing these two words make an excellent post instantly look stupid.

I don't want to tell this guy that he has "bad breath", so to speak. So, I bring it to the forum and maybe he will see it. That's all.
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The spelling in the English language is another animal: We spell it as "sugar" but we pronounce it as "shuger". For anyone who does not have English as their first language it has to be a challenge to figure out. Such as, "By hook or by crook, for my kitchen, I am going to hire a cook. But I hope the cook that I hire is not a crooked kook." You know: hook, cook, crook, nook, book and kook. But "kook" just does not quite fit in this group of words.

If I invited you over to my back yard for a Ghoti fry you would be thinking WTF is he talking about. But if I invited you over for a catfish fry you would start licking your chops. We will be eating blue catghoti and flathead catghoti. Ghoti = fish.