English Going to Hell in a Handbasket
October 3, 2011
On a weekly basis, a conversation usually happens in which someone asks where I went to school and what I earned a degree in, and when they hear that I was an English major, if they don’t already know where I work, they say, “Oh, you’re a teacher then?”. No, I’m not a teacher, and I have a good reason. I would probably fail the majority of my students and become the notoriously honest teacher. We’ll go with the word “honest”. Education, especially when it comes to literature and grammar, seems to have gone wayward. Who knows, maybe classrooms need an “honest” teacher like me, but I’m pretty sure that you’ll never catch me in the front of a classroom for the sole reason that I’d like to keep my remaining sanity.
Education in English may have been going downhill for some time now because, in a world where the bulk of our communication is typed, it’s amazing how terrible some people write. No one is infallible, but you’d think that if a person has grown up speaking a language, they would have at least become proficient in writing it and understanding it. If they haven’t, why would anyone take them seriously when it comes to other things?
If my cardiologist sent me a letter that said, “All you’re insurance papers or in order, and I’m reddy to perform you’re open heart surgery, come in tomorrow around 11:30 and i’ll cut ya open before my lunch break for cheep have a nice day,” I probably wouldn’t be in the same room as this person, much less sedated on a table while he has a scalpel.
I could probably forgive someone whose native language isn’t English. It’s kind of endearing when someone whose native tongue is different slips up, but I grew up with two bilingual parents who were raised by my four French and English-speaking grandparents who were raised by my eight French-speaking great grandparents. My dad didn’t know a lick of English until his first year of school, but he speaks and writes very well these days. How can someone speak and write better in their second language than someone else in their first and only language? It’s quite baffling! Maybe my parents are just smarter than most people. Who knows!
You have to wonder what goes through some people’s minds. How do they think? The way that I write is the way that I think. The sentences that I type/write are straight from my brain in the format that I think them. If all of the words in my head were to print themselves out and float around the room, all the similar ideas would go together and fit into cohesive blocks while all the lagniappes would get stowed away in a completely different compartment with subdivides where the things that are alike would attempt to find each other. It’s a pretty organized place.
Every now and then, I start to think that I’m crazy, but when I read something that says, “some people are so stupid i gotta pee, my nose itches,” I begin to think that I’m pretty normal and actually a little boring. I’d imagine that scary things happen in this person’s mind. Green slime is probably oozing out of the walls of the brain in question, and there might be a clown and a donkey on opposite ends of a teeter totter going in circles, and words are carelessly strewn about in multiple funky fonts that are color coded in an illogical manner.
People with bad grammar like to argue with other people, too, which is amazing. While I can look past a little bad writing to see a good point, I usually never see a good point from someone with bad grammar. They will probably refute the fact that they’re terrible, terrible writers with the fact that they’ve passed every English class that they’ve ever taken, and they were smart enough to earn a college degree.
I’ll never be able to stand in front of a classroom and teach people who are perfectly fine with just getting by. I’m too much of a perfectionist. I’m the girl who consistently says that I’m bad at math because I made 2 B’s in it during my whole school career. I just don’t understand what’s happening in this world. Shouldn’t all people have high standards for themselves? I should probably boycott reading all together….
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVED it! And you’re right, people write the same way they speak. I once worked with a German girl, who was very, very intelligent. She wrote the same way she spoke, which was a little off kilter. However, like you wrote, it was endearing to us because she had overcome so many obstacles to live in the United States. Besides the language, she could do almost anything better than the rest of us.
You, my beautiful daughter, are just a perfectionist, plain and simple. I can actually see all the words in your head, organizing themselves into little groups, waiting for the proper moment to be used. But that’s a good thing, it makes you the wonderful person that you are. I love you, Babydoll!