We are experiencing a drift from what some used to call “The Queen’s English.” Years ago it was referred to as grammar. You learned back in school how to diagram a sentence. Subject/predicate at its simplest form. Noun/verb/predicate were a little more complex.
You learned how to express singular versus plural. You learned present, past and future tenses of verbs. It took me years to understand how not to dangle my participles. We conjugated nouns and verbs, but the old subject-verb agreement just seemed to be natural back in the day.
Pronunciation and enunciation were important when relaying a thought, making a request, or otherwise communicating verbally. Bill Cosby had a Saturday morning cartoon with one character nicknamed “Mush Mouth.”
And that’s just in the spoken word.
In the written word, grammar gets even more complicated. In addition to the rules touched on above, the written word requires knowledge of homonyms. Before “spell check” and grammar check,” a person had to think and pull from knowledge learned many years ago to properly know the spelling and meaning difference between there and their and they’re.
Don’t even get me started on punctuation. The difference between “Don’t, stop” and “Don’t stop” is huge.
The English language likes to throw silent letters in the mix to make reading more difficult to learn. Words like pneumonia, subtle differences and even the name of a weekday – Wednesday. Forget a Wednesday in the month of February. Sound that out in kindergarten.
Make no mistake–I am not a member of the grammar police squad. I no longer dwell on such trivia nor let it bother me like fingernails on a chalkboard. (Do they still have chalkboards in classrooms these days?) Society has grown to accept these lapses in communication etiquette as the status quo.
I sometimes wonder what it says about our country and the devolution of our communication skills.
I still cringe when I hear Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tell me how import-int Trump’s meet-in with President Poot-in will be.
Or when I read a Facebook post massacre every rule for language ever written. But next time you hear two people conversat-in, pay attention to which rules of engage-mint they violate. If they due be speaking good English, it will stand out just as much as if not. Resist the temptation to correct them, if you still have such inclination.
