Language Police

“The Last of the Language Police”
It’s been hard these past several years to see my life’s work crumbling around me. Let me explain. I’ve always been an “English geek.” In sixth grade, I got a note from my mother to give to the bookmobile lady giving me permission to check out books from the “adult section.” I assure you, those words in the 1950’s held none of the connotations they hold now. English was my best subject in high school. I became an English teacher. It was tough enough to fight what I perceived as a general societal prejudice against my chosen profession, but then you, well, many of you, made English teachers’ lives more difficult by giving all of our students misinformation.
How many times have I walked into a restaurant only to see that the daily specials included “hot dog’s” or “strawberry’s” or “brownie’s”? It is maddening, I assure you, that so many people can’t remember that, in general, an apostrophe shows a possessive noun, not a plural noun. There are a few exceptions, but don’t worry about those.
And, as long as I’m harping about apostrophes, would the people responsible for the title “America Your Beautiful” on the local access channel wake up and smell the contraction? One day I’d like to be channel surfing and see “America, You’re Beautiful.” I could die reasonably happy.
Our language, the language that some would make the official and only language of the USA, is riddled with the blights of ignorance and indolence. In other words, most Americans don’t know the rules of their native language and are too lazy to do anything about it. Consequently, someone writing copy for the plot of the movie Brick on cable TV thought “as he searches for answers he is lead to the town’s crime world” is correct. A billboard gives directions to a subdivision by advising “go two miles and than turn right.”
The designer for a lobby poster for Mel Gibson’s new film, Apocalypto, put these words on it: “No one can escape their destiny.” On the National Geographic Channel, a narrator utters, “If a singer hits the right resonance, they can shatter a glass.”
There is a rule of grammar which states that certain things in a sentence must be in agreement, like pronouns. The poster quote should be: “No one can escape his destiny.” The narrator should have said, “If a singer hits the right resonance, he can shatter a glass.” Why does every person on television, every broadcaster on the radio, and nearly every written publication not exercise agreement between pronouns? The answer is simple: politics.
Back in the 70’s, as the Women’s Movement was feeling its muscle and starting to make positive changes for women in our society, they also got a little too bent out of shape over the grammatical rule of agreement. “The language is gender-specific,” they cried. “It therefore is repressive to women.” Since no one was able to find or invent another word that was satisfactory to all interested parties, society caved in and abandoned pronoun agreement. Imagine trying to teach a rule to people who see and hear that rule being violated everywhere they look every single day.
Oh, at this point I’d like to assure all my Feminist friends and colleagues that I have no more quarrel with their agenda than I have with any other agendas, except mine, of course.
Recently, a school district on the West Coast wanted to let students write in “Ebonics.” And doing that will help them get a job? Go to college? Function in the real world? Another school system proposes that their students be allowed to write their essays in the language of text messaging. R U COOL W/THAT? :-)
The signs of the Apocalypse are all around us. The end is nigh. The Old Testament tells us that God set us back on our heels by inventing different languages at the Tower of Babel. This time He’s being equally creative. He’s fragmenting one language into many. The result will be the same.