I have stopped counting the number of times I have seen ungrammatical memes on Facebook, or posts or Tweets that use improper English. Somehow, half of the world never learned the difference between "your" and "you're." Comma splices? No problemo. Sentence fragments?! Adorable!
Most people have no clue about The Horrors of Bad English. I see grammar mistakes and they leap off the page and slap me upside the head and make me want to scream.
So how did I go from being the child who audibly groaned when asked to diagram a sentence in 6th grade to an adult who cannot tolerate bad grammar or the horror of a misplaced comma?
English was my bugaboo as a small child. I much preferred numbers. Numbers are straightforward and simple -- at least before you have to start learning Algebra. Arithmetic -- now that's where I could shine. In fourth grade a friend of mine taught me how to do math in my head, and I became a whiz at that. I see numbers in my head and it's much easier for me to calculate, say, 25% off, than it is for my son.
I was reminded the other day of the endless, torturous hours learning to diagram sentences when I saw a funny meme about it.
Here's a fun fact: I had the same English teacher all 4 years of middle school except for 7th grade. Sometime after I went on to high school she stopped teaching English, and for the last 30+ years she has only taught middle school social studies. I don't think I drove her away -- I think it was her disgust at how bad most of her students were at diagramming sentences.
I still remember the torture of sitting there in her classroom, diagramming sentences. I can still pick out the subject and verb in any sentence, and all dependent and independent clauses, though -- blindfolded and under heavy anesthesia just for fun.
Seriously.
I mean, I literally cringe when I see nouns and verbs disagreeing in a sentence. [I am a bit perturbed by the overuse of the word "literally" these days...]
English was not always uniform, or rigid. Spelling was fast and loose until the last hundred years or so.
If you look at the history of the English language you learn a lot about gumbo. Yep, English is like the gumbo of languages -- a whole lot of other folks threw in words that became part of English. Now it's a tasty stew, delightful to native English speakers, not always palatable to those trying to learn it.
English is composed of a lot of appropriated words.
The Vikings gave us these: run, husband, egg, knife.
The French gave us these: fruit, people, liberty.
"Spanish also had an influence on American English (and subsequently British English), with words like canyon, ranch,stampede and vigilante being examples of Spanish words that entered English through the settlement of the American West."
I could write a book about all the words we took from other languages, but who would read it?!
Spelling is also a bugaboo for many people. It's easy for me. I rarely mess up spelling.
All these are fun little facts about English but what I started to write about here was the fact that English is also like Rodney Dangerfield these days, not getting any respect.
Kids are not being drilled in grammar and punctuation and usage the way we were, long long ago. Heck, the kids don't even have to write in cursive. They are being spared the torture. Is it because everything typed nowadays is on a computer and spell check and grammar check are taking the place of actually knowing that stuff?!? Horrors!
Let me tell you a scary thing, kids: those green lines under your sentences? They ain't always correct. The computer isn't always right.
Plus, it's like I was telling my student the other day, he can use spell check and every other crutch under the sun right up until he's writing that crucial essay on a standardized test, and then... OOPS. You think college recruiters care about nouns and verbs agreeing?!? Um, YES. Yes, they do. They don't want graduates who cannot write a decent paragraph.
We tend to just look the other way when someone cannot write well, and the world is poorer for it.
I worked for an attorney once who was HORRIBLE at writing and I used to try and correct everything she wrote before it went out, to spare her embarrassment. I wasn't always successful -- she produced such a huge volume of work sometimes I wouldn't keep up. She paid so little attention to proper English that it never occurred to her that opposing attorneys were sneering at her lack of skills -- I guess if you're oblivious to your own bad English you don't understand why anyone would denigrate you for idiotic errors. Most attorneys are good or even great wordsmiths, however.
I read stories all the time that were published on the internet [okay, some of them were clickbait, but entertaining anyway, so don't judge] and the English in those stories is appalling. Sentences are horribly awkward.
I hope one day students will once again actually CARE about writing proper English, but I am not holding my breath.
Folks like my mom, who have beautiful handwriting (in cursive!) and who value proper English and know how to actually use a paper dictionary are a dying breed, much to my sadness.
