Gosh, what a pit of horrors! Let me beg your indulgence to post a copy of an opinion piece (rant, if you will) that I wrote for the newspaper at which I work:
They wrought better than they knew, the succession of teachers who graced the halls of the Pine Grove Grade School and Mid-Valley Jr. High in the mid-1950’s and early 1960’s. Though we students would probably have denied it at the time, their efforts at imprinting correct English in our foggy little heads was highly successful. So successful, in fact, that bad language usage haunts me even today, over 30 years later.
That is not to say I don’t appreciate slang or interesting jargon or verbal shorthand. Some authors and poets bend words as skillfully as a jazzman bends the notes of Blues in The Night. The point is, both the poet and musician know how to use the rules correctly before they start fooling around.
And I will concede that language does evolve, sometimes against the old rules. One such example is the word “graduate.” In years past, it was a noun only, referring to a person who had successfully completed a course of study at some institution. The accepted verb form was: “Mr. Joe Blow was graduated from Harvard.”
“If you are unsure, substitute the word ‘promoted’ in the sentence, and listen to it,” said Mr. Martin, the seventh grade Voice of Authority. And, sure enough, “He promoted from high school,” sounds dead wrong.
But too many people have been in too much of a hurry to drop the “was” from the equation, and now it is almost a bygone distinction.
I’ll even concede that homonyms can trip people up. There is a sign in this very town that talks about a storefront that was “formally” something else. Obviously, the word being grasped for was “formerly,” a completely different meaning.
It’s easy to get caught by homonyms, and those of us who use computers know that they won’t get caught by a spell-checker, either.
No, these days I’m saving my ire for a couple of truncated phrases and a ghastly new construction.
Somewhere in corporate America there is a small cabal of executives who have a grudge against the letter “D,” no doubt because they received so many of them on their report cards. And so they have perpetuated such idiocies as “ice tea” and “old fashion,” both of which grate on sensitive nerves like fingernails on the chalkboard.
C’mon, guys, spelling out “old fashioned” and “iced tea,” won’t make you any less hip, and may earn you the respect and affection you missed out on in your earlier life.
But the ultimate indignity heaped upon the language these days, the certain sign that the barbarians are at the language gates, can be found in the language of teenagers reporting conversations to other teenagers. Have your earplugs standing by while you give it a careful listen:
“So she was, like, ‘I’m sooo sure,’ and I was, like, ‘No way!’ and then Kevin was like, ‘Whoa,’ and she was, like …” At this point, we’ll draw a merciful veil of silence.
I’m sorry to have to expose you to that, and sorrier still when I find similar conversations reported in a certain major metropolitan daily newspaper in this state that should know better.
How can we avoid the further corruption of our language - the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Blake - and for that matter, the language of John D. MacDonald, Robert A. Heinlein and Louis L’Amour?
Don’t respond when people use such language. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow you. What do you mean, ‘She was like?’ Do you mean ‘She said’ or ‘She whined’ or ‘She argued?’ You can’t communicate if you don’t know the right words.”
Perhaps if they are made to clarify it, they will at least have the practice of using it right, and eventually the “I was like” construction will join the ranks of conversational fossils such as “The bee’s knees” and “23 Skidoo!”
Thanks I feel much better now
