I am a wife, a mother of two college-age children, an American, a resident of Germany, a devoted reader, and a lover of language. I taught English and German in a small high school in Wisconsin (USA) for 16 years, I worked in the business world before that (in the customer service department of a moving company), and I graduated from Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Appleton, WI, with a B.A. in English.
And I have a terminal illness. The language of my countrymen and -women is going to kill me.
The importance of speaking and writing properly has been drilled into my brain since I began uttering semi-intelligible phrases, and this has led to a yet unnamed illness in which I can hardly read or listen to anything without seeing or hearing examples of polluted language. Typos are annoying enough, but I'm not talking about those - I make them, too. I am referring to errors which would be equivalent to
3 + 4 = 9in the math world. Yeah, I can figure out what you meant, but it's flat wrong.
In this blog I will focus on the (American) English language and the errors that have become so common that few people even know what's correct anymore - and fewer probably care. I am not perfect, and if you notice an error in my blog, please let me know. I used to give my students bonus points if they found errors on handouts I gave them... I realize that one of the things making English difficult is the number of exceptions to rules. Native speakers of American English, though, have polluted the language by creating exceptions that don't exist!
If you are looking for precise, formal, textbook-type explanations, you probably won't find them here. There are dozens of great grammar sites and blogs for that, which I also visit! I'm going to try to keep things quick and simple. While teaching teenagers I learned that most people don't want long, wordy explanations. The average person who just wants to improve his language enough not to embarrass himself in high company wants a tip he can remember and internalize quickly. So I'm going to tell you, for instance, "NEVER say 'I'm doing good.'" Is there an occasion when that sentence IS grammatically correct? Yes - if you are, at the time of saying it, feeding the hungry or housing the homeless. But it's rather uncool to announce to the world that you are doing good (works). So again I say, "NEVER say 'I'm doing good.'"
I am not intending to address regional dialects. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where I grew up, people commonly use "by" for "to" or "at" - as in:
"Let's go down by the lake." (to the lake)or
"Where are you, Sally?" "By Mom's. Why?" (at Mom's house)That's vernacular. "I should have went to the lake" is not vernacular. It's horrifically wrong, and it will never be correct no matter how many people say, "That sounds ok to me..."
Why does speaking and writing correctly matter? If you've read this far, you probably already know. But just for one example, if I were involved in the hiring process for any job position that requires spoken or written communication (and which job doesn't?), given two candidates with otherwise equal qualifications, I would give it to the person who makes fewer language mistakes. In fact, if one person had more years of experience but the other made fewer language mistakes, I'd still give it to the latter.
Friends and students have called me pedantic and old-fashioned - and I may be the first but am surely the second - but that's the way it is. If you want to see where our spoken and written communication is headed, watch the futuristic movie Idiocracy, where the main character, who speaks better English than the others (and his grammar is by no means perfect), is called "faggy" just because he speaks clearly.
This is our language, folks. Let's clean it up!
Final notes:
- Yes, I like to use parentheses, dashes, and ellipses.
- I hate what social media has done to written English.
- The word "like" should be banned from public use, and people who use it should be punished. It makes me, like, so, like, mad when, like, I hear people - especially, like, teenagers - using this word, like, every few seconds. Like, what the heck?
- In most cases, if parents care about speaking and writing correctly, so will their children. A person's ability to use language correctly has more to do with the language spoken at home than what they are taught in English classes in school.
- I wish I could take my red pen to modern writers of young adult fiction. Many of them deliberately (?) use grammatically incorrect English in both dialog (I can live with that) and narrative (nope), probably in the name of "writing as my readers speak." Oh, thanks. That's really helpful for these kids.
- Mark Twain was one of the most brilliant American writers of all time. When you are that brilliant, you can do what the heck you want with language (vernacular, blatant mistakes, non-standard usage, inconsistent punctuation, fragments, bad spelling...). Double-standard? Absolutely.
"What the hell was it about email that made everybody forget the stuff they learned in second grade, [such as] capitalizing I and proper names, and using periods? Hello? We all learned how to do this less than five years out of diapers!" ~ MaryJanice Davidson, Undead and Unwelcome
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