Okay, I don’t want to actually hurt
anyone. I don’t want to put out a contract on an ex-lover. I don’t want to hire a thug to break the
knees of a rival. I don’t want to seek assistance
from a withered hag to curse my former friend.
I don’t even want to assassinate the president. I just want to stop
people from speaking in such a way that it appears they’ve been raised by
larger primates.
I teach high school English, and I
realize that most people don’t speak perfectly.
I even make grammatical errors in my daily conversation. I’m not unaware of the fact that my job puts
me in a position to recognize other people’s speech deficiencies, but I try to
be realistic and look for the meaning behind what people say. No one is any more annoyed with people who
verbally correct other people’s speech in public conversation than I. I think it’s rude, and somewhat demeaning,
and people can be embarrassed unnecessarily.
If you
correct people like this, they start to avoid you, and you become a social
pariah.
That
said, I want to scream when I hear phrases like, “I seen,” “My fiend house,” “Had
went,” and “We conversate.” These aren’t
just verbal mistakes, but they are roughly the equivalent of baby talk. This kind of verbal illiteracy crosses racial
lines and weaves through all layers of socio-economic status. I worry that common speech is descending into
a morass of lazy thinking and lack of concern that the rest of intelligent
humanity is laughing at us.
Other
languages have rules and people who speak that tongue look at you befuddled if
you use incorrect tenses or even idiotic pronunciation, but English—being the most
wide-spread language of communication—often
accommodates errors. But accommodation
can only go so far before we become the linguistic joke of the planet. If this
was a problem only heard in sub-cultures or ethnic communities, it wouldn’t
bother me any more than any accent, slang, creole or pidgin, but it isn’t.
This may
be the harbinger to the end of civilization as we know it.
2 comments:
Sometimes I worry about the English language. I'm no expert, but I feel the same way as you do about the current state of accepted speech. I long for society to bring language back to what it once was, filled with creative arrangements. I know there is evolution of language, but in a way, I wish there wasn't. Maybe I am too old fashioned, to the extent of placing an antiquated system of language over a modern development, but that's who I choose to be: old fashioned in many ways, while trying to endure, even embrace, modern life.
Reading the newspaper has become an angry exercise for me. It is one of the places that I expect intelligent editing to occur - if not for content, then at least for grammar and usage.
I believe that the loss of good grammar is the wagging tail of loss of propriety and grace - when everyone is your 'bitch', what difference does it make how you say it?
I am an admin on a gaming server that has a swear filter - point penalties for typing in the wrong words. I have taken it upon myself to instruct my fellow gamers to find new and creative ways to insult each other, many are quite capable, and in this small way I try to advance our culture in this very small way. We all have to do our part.
I would love to be a newspaper editor, but - of course - I don't think that career move would be a good one.
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