Out of the Box
A grammarian’s lament
Last spring, two men calling themselves the Typo Eradication Advancement League got themselves in hot water for adding and eradicating punctuation marks from a sign in the Grand Canyon National Park. Although they were charged with vandalism of a national monument, they treated the whole thing as a lark. Maybe they had finally reached the same sad conclusion that I have regarding our post-literate world: proper grammar, punctuation and usage is dying, no matter how much we self-appointed guardians kick and bellow.
Some might say that the English language is in fact evolving into a post-literate period when certain technological and cultural changes have made a formal standard—the Queen’s English—outdated and fussy. But there are people who can rationalize any new trend, cultural shift or idea, let alone ones that have to do with language. After all, they point out pedantically, language is about communicating. If you show concern about lowered standards and deteriorating usage in English, you get lumped in with all the stuffy reactionaries who rail against pierced eyebrows and Miley Cyrus’s precociously bare shoulders.
However, when one is immersed in proper English as a teacher, writer, and reader, the errors assail the sensibilities—like how Yo-Yo Ma and Placido Domingo must feel every time they turn on Top 40 radio. I too blanch at the misuse of the apostrophe—the comma that jumped in the air—on official signs, reports, etc. I watch their misplacement stream by on CNN’s continually running “news ticker” at the bottom of the screen. I add them with a Sharpie, or exterminate them (with extreme prejudice) with white-out, from the innumerable student-made posters in the halls of my school. With a righteous finger, I erase them from the whiteboard in the teachers’ lounge.
I’m not just talking about booboos and errors here; I’m talking about ignorance, and the attitude that properly written English doesn’t matter. It’s difficult enough trying to rid students of writing “should of” and “I seen,” but I get a sinking feeling when a grade 8 student tells me she doesn’t know the plural of “boy” isn’t “boyz.” Young people are at the front lines of this post-literate shift, and it can only harm their skills when the language that influences them may be intentionally misspelled, such as “street” hip-hop language, and texting/instant messaging shorthand. The latter may be the greatest cause of the shrinking ice-cap of formal English.
An ex-student, a UNBC undergraduate, sends me the occasional text or MSN message, and sometimes I have to decipher her meaning. Words run into each other, they break up and join others, and they are misspelled. Once in a while it’s like looking into a bowl of Alphagetti, with letters randomly clumped together. She clearly doesn’t care about her sloppiness and has even told me so. It’s the torrent of words that matters to her, the content.
Whether or not the meaning of those words gets obscured by how they are presented does matter though. Obviously, she “cleans up her act” when she must write a paper for her classes, but how hard is it to make the switch? Is it more difficult for her to write thoughts of a higher order when she’s accustomed to tapping and thumbing without care? Does typing “brb” instead of “be right back” encourage other kinds of shortcuts in writing and thinking?
As I mentioned above, I feel powerless to do anything that will actually have an impact on the corrosion of written English. Certainly, this Andy Rooney-style lament has little practical value. One thing I can do is always send grammatically correct texts and instant messages, even if I’m holding a sandwich in one hand. Long live the struggle!
By: Bee
17 May 2010
By: Bee
18 May 2010