Any competent teacher knows in what direction our kids communication skills are headed. Perhaps we who still speak should pay more attention to the political consequences of the decline.
Words matter... but when theyre reduced to mush they cease to matter. Take those words I just typed. A certain college freshman persisted in writing seize" for cease" this past week despite my protestations. At the moment I have no way of knowing if he truly considers them to be the same word (since my protest was pennedI didnt have a chance to pull him aside) or if his favorite i-Gadget rather is selecting seize" as the most likely correction of some bizarre misspelling. In a way it doesnt make any difference. Young people have so little respectmost of themfor anything written by themselves or anyone else that they generously give a free pass to crude approximations when they proofread their own work or read anothers. The apostrophe that I placed before that sentence-ending s" is of course optional these days. One finds it making plurals as often as showing possession now. Sounds the same in either case... what the hell! As long as people know what youre trying to say whats it matter how you say it?
So we have before us a muddy stew wherein are stirred more or less equal measures of pitiful ignorance sheer laziness mechanized intrusion and a dumbed-down kind of proletarian resistance that rejoices in trampling precision and propriety. Of this last the new Oxford Modern English Grammar authored by one Bas Aarts (a moniker that could be anything from Dutch to Polynesian for all I know) is a scintillant example. I ordered this text for an upper-division class blindly naively trusting in the Oxford brand. Big mistake (maybe thats what bas aarts" means in Pashtu). The indicative isnt even a mood any more while can" is a fully acceptable substitute for may" in subjunctive situationsand may" indeed is only used by snooty people in a bid to be socially one-up. Contemporary grammarians apparently create very fluid rules designed to keep pace with usage on the streets. Anything else is dead and phony. If Generation Omega wants to have cease" and seize" be interchangeable for instance... why let it be so (or should I say let it is so"or how about lets so"?).
Theres the bothersome little detail that thought requires words and hence that abused words and clumsy structures produce weak thinking. But is this not perhaps the overall political objective of higher education" after all: to grind out easily manipulated imbeciles? I was told also this past week that an outspoken young mana genuine free spirithad dropped my composition class because he realized that I was sometimes arguing positions just to generate a response and not because I truly held them. This has never happened to me before. I have been charged by the occasional ideologue with being too opinionated because I would not fully yield to his peeves and raves; but Ive never been rebuked before now for being too fair-minded. Tomorrows young voter Im guessing will not want any discussion will not want an exchange of views: I write that on the confident assumption that I will receive this new rebuke again and in increasing volume. Why wouldnt I? Once downfall" and pitfall" mean the same thing and culture" is a synonym for race" what have we left but gut feelings decked out in emoticons? The rest of Free Spirits class is already wholly uninterested in such distinctions as it collectively texts away thumbs pecking feverishly under the desks. He the lately departed one is actually much more apt to repent and start thinking: at least he has a pulse.
In political (or politicized) discourse we all know that the word racist" has become nothing more than verbalized kick-and-spittle; and the word isolationist" as I wrote a few weeks ago isnt lagging far behind. Tea Party" has successfully been concentrated into a little sticky-with-Swastika for many post-literate undergraduates just as gay marriage" has acquired the warm ring-tone (or is it now ringtone"?) bestowed upon calls from Mother.
I have written lately likewise about the stark insanity of progressive idolatry; but the insane of course profit from drawing crowds of speechless oafs. Where would Don Quixote be without Sancho Panza (and no class the guys first name is not Donald")? I honestly dont know if the newly minted word hater"as a stand-alone noun unconnected to any objectsreflects more lunacy or more obtundity. Every sentient being of modest brain function hates something. Horses hate a whip I should imagine; rabbits hate hounds. Higher beings capable of love must always hate what stands in adversarial relation to their affections focus. People who love children hate child abuse. People who love freedom hate slavery. People who love noble deeds hate vile acts. In a crowning irony the contemporary devolved primate who crinkles his low brow shows his canines and hisses Hater!" at the person he would lustily tear to ribbons had he the means captures every nuance of visceral fuming hatred. His snapshot could become the words emoticon.
Southerners used to resent deeply the appellation rebel" inasmuch as their homeland was invaded and put to the torch by fellow countrymen" who seemed intent first on legally reducing them to rags and then on punishing them capitally for mounting resistance. A true rebel should be made of more recalcitrant stuff. Yet for generations these very people have willingly tagged their local athletic clubs with the same word. An Atlanta baseball franchise dubbed itself the Crackers during the high-water mark of segregation a noun which stands in about the same relation to Caucasians as the n" slur does to Americans of African descent. Other sports teams to this day style themselves after rapists plunderers and murderers of historical proportions: pirates raiders Vikings Jayhawkers and the like. Their insignias may feature skulls crossbones and instruments of mayhem.
Obviously such semantic gestures are all veering in a single direction: Were your worst nightmare! Were bad really bad! Go aheadcall us rebels! Call us buccaneers! When you yell that at us youre trembling. Stay scared! Call us redskins!"
Juvenile? Of course it is. Sport is play. Our comedians take liberties with acceptable adult usage all the time (to the point that I personally have found nothing comic about them for years). Yet the same people who will permit themselves any wordstrained to any degree of abuse in spelling or meaningwill also demand the right to preen our common vocabulary of words they may choose to construe in narrow unflattering terms. No more redskins" say the prissy prophets of PC. The point of the exercise appears to be to remind us of their moral superiority. We may use a word entirely without the meaning or intent that they foist upon it; they then step in and unfurl our pedigree to a heritage of loathsome squalor (and by implication their own regal title to be Oracle of the Collective Conscience). If we protest our faces are pelted with a rain of stinging emoticons.
So it comes to pass at last that no words dont really matter much at all. Only the gut matters: only barks and howls matter. Saliva and volume win the argument. This is true even of our best and brightest"perhaps especially of them the ones who are spreading the disease to our children. Tenured and laurelled professors are appearing now on TV in tweed and bow-tie and insisting that Obamacare is a ripping successthat citizens are being served that discontent is a Republican myth that policy cancellations merely indict the profit motive driving private insurers (the wealthiest of whom may make almost as much as an Economics prof at MIT)… that in short the distance between their fantasy and harsh reality is to be measured in your and my depravity. And rebuttal will be met with a shrilly shouted I have the floor!" or Thats a lie!" I saw two such specimens lighting up FOX News last Thursday night.
This is where we are: this is what we must now deal with daily. Something like a new Neanderthal with advanced technology and hive-politics as midwife is slouching toward Washington to be born… and I dont mean something in football pads. Its a new kind of spooka dead man walking who wont walk away from us any time soon.