All hail Grammar!

Now, I try not to be a spelling and grammar Nazi, for I know that mine is not perfect,  but I know that I can be from time to time.  It's just disconcerting when I see the wrong punctuation used or people that really and truly need to figure out what the fuck a comma is.  For those of you who don't know it's this ',' Easily found, just hit the key right beside your period button. Yep. No. Not on the right, it's to the left, but it's right beside it. A friend of mine asked me to read a thread he was in. Naturally, I obliged… and immediately regretted it. His posts were great, a few spelling errors and such but nothing that really tightened my asshole.  Her posts… oh my god.  Now I know that not everyone is a great writer, and I can overlook things readily.  But what got me were two things about her posts.  The first was that she used two dots for an ellipsis.  That always irks me; it's one of my peeves.  A writing professor once told my creative writing class, back during the days that I actually attended college - and actually attended class, which was something that was far more rare - that only people who are "lazy or stupid use two dots. Always use three." That's a direct quote and it stuck with me because I never wanted to appear lazy or stupid in my writing.  Now while an ellipsis may originally mean that something is being left out, usually a hint at something darker or hidden, it is often used in speech to mean that someone has trailed off.  I don't honestly know if that's a correct grammatical habit, however, it makes reading flow more easily than just ending the sentence with the finality of a period.  It's something I do a lot myself. The second thing was her overuse of the semicolon. It is not a comma. Not a comma! Using it as one sets my toes to twitching.  It has specific uses.    Here's what the wikipedia page says about that. So I might sound like a picky bitch, but we all have things that irk us. I can only shrug at that and state that spelling is a smaller peeve than grammar. Why? Why does grammar twist me so badly? Because it dictates how things that I read are perceived by my brain. It shows how things are said, how they sound, and what is intended by the sentence.  I'm sure we can all remember the elementary school English lessons where we learned about the comma and things read differently depending on where the comma was placed.  If I can't understand what the other writer is trying to say then we have issues because it's going to be taken in a way that the other person didn't mean and that can quickly derail a game.