cunning linguists

laptop keyboards, although crowded and not exactly ergonomic, teach us important lessons about grammar.
one such important lesson involves contractions. not childbirth contractions. literary contractions. can't you get your mind out of the gutter for a single second? i guess it really is me with my mind in the gutter to assume that you were thinking aah nevermind let us move on, shall we?
today my flat, featureless jerk of a laptop keyboard proved that i need to avoid contractions at all costs. every time i try to write 'don't' or 'can't' i end up hitting the enter key instead of the apostrophe (because they are butt buddies on keyboards) and i end the phrase prematurely. on regular keyboards this isn't an issue because each key is well defined in its own little private zone of finger touching. even the keys on my phone are designed well enough to allow touch typing with few errors. not on a macbook pro. this mistake causes confusion for the person i am conversing with, and agonizing frustration on my end as i try to hit the correct key and simultaneously explain my idiot mistake. maybe i am just completely haphazard with my typing, but no. mario was a great teacher, between all those trails through oregon. a doctor contracting dysentery was an 80s child's first delicious taste of irony.
i learned two important things today.
one is that you should just write out the words instead of shortening everything with apostrophes, because it keeps the flow of your typing at a much more satisfactory pace.
the second thing i learned is that maybe you should not be so damn negative all the time.
most contractions involve the word 'not' and there are only a few outside of that paradigm, such as 'let us' and "i am".
go look it up. no, in a real book. do you think wikipedia is fool-proof?