Students: did you know you actually can sit in the second and third floor hallways during lunch? And the WAUD too? Go ahead and chow down, my friends.

Surely everybody has seen the blue signs plastered all over the school, sheets of paper hung up intermittently every ten feet supposedly telling us to not eat on the second or third hallways during lunch. However, that’s not exactly what they say. Look closely, and the poster actually reads “NO eating lunch on second and third floors and at Whittier Woods.”

The operative word there is and. If the poster had said “NO eating lunch on second or third floor or at Whittier Woods” then we’d be toast. But it says and instead. What this means is that you can eat in any of those three locations at lunch, provided you don’t sit in all of them at the same time.

Want to eat a baguette sandwich outside the foreign language department and then stroll down and eat a salad outside the APES classroom? Go ahead, as long as you visit two of the locations, and not three. All these signs provide is protection against nomadic lunch tribes (of which there are few, off the top of my head).

Sure, this seems like a small nitpick, but it may just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (or the heart of your English teacher). Some people may think it’s ludicrous to have to differentiate between “their” and “there” or “your” and “you’re,” but you have to learn eventually. Do you really want to be the guy who runs the gas station in Bethesda that confuses “to” and “too” on a sign outside the cashier window?

Ever notice how on a Facebook post from a popular page (e.g. a sports team, company, Humans of New York, etc.), the comments that get the most likes happen to be the ones from people shamelessly emasculating an earlier commenter who made a glaring grammatical error? Sure, that guy seems smug and obnoxious, but hey, I think you’d rather be the corrector than the correctee.

I think it’s safe to say that if everybody were to take a quiz on the important grammatical distinctions of our language, we would all do just fine. But the worst part is that so many people know they’re making a mistake, and do it anyway. My little brother, one of smartest eighth-graders you’ll ever meet, will consistently, deliberately, text me messages like, “your coming home by 3:00 right?” and my response is always, “My what?”

At the end of the day, maybe not knowing the difference between “affect” and “effect” isn’t the end of the world (although here’s a hint: correctly use “effect” as a verb in its correct context, and you’re golden. Plus, you’ll get the satisfaction of seeing your teacher cross it out, and then have to correct her own correction when she realizes maybe you’re not the simpleton she had thought you were). But where does it come to an end?

Back to the example of our blue fliers: do we really want institutionalized bad grammar, in a school nonetheless? That’s where we should draw the line. So until we get some real change in this country, I say we stick it to them: only eat lunch on the second and third hallways, and in the WAUD, until justice is done. That’ll teach them a lesson.