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Grammar ain't what it used to be
© by Mike Keenan 
Dear Mr. Retired Person,
Is it me or is it the kids? When I was in school, we were taught rules of grammar and spelling. We had spelling bees. I always finished near the top. I had some trouble with the letter j, often confusing it with g. So, for example, if the teacher asked me to spell hegemony, I would spell it hejemony. I'm getting tired of the poor communication skills out there today. It gust makes me so anjry! What do you think? Thanks, Jeffrey J. Johnston Jr., Jordan Dear Jeffrey, I feel your pain. Remember how much fun it was to parse a sentence? We used coloured chalk to underline parts of speech and place brackets around principal clauses versus subordinate clauses. When I realized that an entire subordinate clause could be a modifier, I knew that I was in the big leagues. Just the thought of a complex, compound sentence now makes my heart twitter. Actually, it doesn't take much to cause my heart to twitter. A steep set of stairs does it. The problem now is that they don't teach grammar except in modern language classes. If you are going to learn French or Spanish, you must know grammar. Otherwise, you will talk to somebody in Spain or France and sound to them like this: "Excuse ourselves, mister from Spain or France, but can you please to help me find where is the bathroom is if you can thank u very much." It gets pretty bad if you do not know vocabulary and grammar. That's where we older types can help. We can provide youngsters with helpful grammar lessons. I have downloaded some samples from the best place to find poor communication. That's right; the government. So, try these out on your little friends: "I am forwarding my marriage certificate and six children I have seven but one died which was baptized on a half sheet of paper." This is an example of bad grammar and some shoddy thinking. The reason why she had seven children was obviously because of poor grammar. If she had learned good grammar, she would know when to stop. Like after the word, "certificate." The misplaced modifier is another example of sloppy thinking. People use water for baptism, not paper. Let's go to our next example. "Mrs. Jones had not had any clothes for a year and has been visited regularly by the clergy." Okay, what we have here is a licentious woman trying to entrap a man of the cloth. I'm sure that the writer meant to say that Mrs. Jones was poor, and she therefore needed clothing, not that she sat around naked, waiting to surprise a visitor. Poor grammar will get you into trouble as evidenced by the fertile lady above. Next example: "Please find for certain if my husband is dead. The man I am living with can't eat or do anything until he knows." This is a tricky piece of grammar. Does the writer like many women, live with a seemingly brain dead husband caught up in some sort of existential angst that Beckett portrays in his absurd plays such as Waiting for Godot? Or, is the woman indeed, the same fertile woman as in example number one? Hard to say. Let's move on. "I am very much annoyed to find you have branded my son illiterate. This is a dirty lie as I was married a week before he was born." Aha, it seems that all of these sentence errors from the government are related to the same lady, the one who is obsessed with sex. I'm not trying to read into subtext, the message hidden between the lines, but we have here a woman who is only interested in one thing. And it stems from poor grammar. It may seem like Eliot's Waste Land out there, but Jeffrey, do not give up hope. |
