Anyone who has had to proofread my contributions to this paper on a weekly basis will know that I, as do all writers, have certain faults that keep repeating themselves. I have a love-hate relationship with commas and, on occasion, struggle with sentence structure and run-ons.
So when I catch myself wincing in pain over what I hear and read coming from others, you know it has to be bad. Perhaps I'm just feeling their pain. Unfortunately, 90 per cent of the population, especially a big team of those under the age of 18, don't even realize they are brutalizing the English language.
My language and literature marks from high school will attest to my weaknesses, so I am reluctant to lecture, but jeepers creepers Sam, our Ministry of Education gurus must be doing a little grimacing when they hear some of the stuff coming out of the mouths, keyboards and papers submitted by today's literary upstarts.
Mind you, we've also embraced some wonderfully written tomes from young writers, so all is not lost. I believe it's just the basic skills that we've come to accept as being passable and hardly worth correcting.
My favourite case in point is the ever increasingly used phrase "Me and my friends went to the movie" or whatever venue. In fact I am even hearing "Me and him" in television and movie dialogues now. Do English teachers still try to correct this glaring miscue? Or do they feel it doesn't matter any more?
Phrases like "you've got" or "he doesn't speak English very good," are usually given a free pass. I've even seen "you've got" written on a billboard touting the advantages of attending a certain educational institution. Obviously, it did not specialize in language or literature.
How often do we reference people as being "that" instead of "who"? People that do that, probably don't know that they're mistaken.
So what, you say?
Well, I guess that's the point isn't it.
Does it really matter if we do a little mangling of the English language as long as we can deliver a discernable message?
Communication these days is usually all about half sentences, incomplete thoughts or rambling discourses with a scrambled message in the middle. If you have to get something across in 140 characters, there is no sense in being capable of clarified communication.
And I could continue with my second pet peeve spelling. It seems somewhere down our educational path in Canada we have become inundated with Americanized spelling of a whole host of words. Two that quickly come to mind are "centre" and "cheque". Most students, and yes, most educators are now using center and check, and I don't know if I should be angry, bemused, frustrated or accepting. I'd love to hear what teachers say about this Americanization trend.
I know in our reporting style books we were instructed a few years ago to start Americanizing words like labour to labor and neighbourhood to neighborhood. Then, about eight years ago, we were told to go back to the English/Canadian versions, probably because there were too many organizations that were spelling it the "old-fashioned" way.
So, like, you know, where are you on this English stuff and things, dear diary?
