Three months ago, I did not know what a comma splice was. I noticed them from time to time and it usually gave me a mild sense of benevolent superiority. Now I know what they are, they really bug me. The irony is that I learned about the comma splice through a blog post that mocks people for being wound up by them.
A comma splice is where a comma is used to join two distinct thoughts: “He ran into the forest, he was pretty scared.”
A more common comma abuse is using one where a complete thought is followed by an addendum: it’s usually more correct to use a colon or semicolon in those cases. For example: “Please do not throw your towels on the floor, use the bins provided.” I don’t know if that counts as a comma splice, since the two clauses are not completely self-sufficient.
This was going to be a post about what a White Person I have become, but I forgot what the other thing was that I started to get annoyed about only after I learned the name for it.