What’s happening to the English language these days? Reading threw magazines and newspapers and books, I’m always coming across embarasing typos and mispellings, awkward sentences, errors in punctuation, nouns and verbs disagreeing worse than a Survivor episode.

Their is a major crisis here, and the affect of it all could have untold consequences on the future of human communication as we know it. Its gotten to be so commonplace - these errors - that I will actually stop reading a certin periodical just because it’s grammatical mistakes offend me so much. Why can’t people just take a little extra time an read back over what they’ve writen? Is it just plane old lazyness or do people just not value the language they use to comunnicate?

I use to be so open-minded. Having taken a linguistics class in college, my education led me to realize that language is constantly evolving to truly reflect the people who use it. Certain words are ketp, while others, are tost out. When the Bible was translated from Hebrew to Latin, it was known as the Vulgate, or vulgar, version because back then Latin was considered the common people’s language and therefor not as worthy. Strange how today we hold Latin in such high esteam.

Punctuation has also evolved. In fact, our modern punctuation marks were not standardized fuly until the 18th century. The dictionery came about as a way to standardize languages in the Western world, simply so their wudn’t be all these diferent spellings of the same wurdz.

But today, nobody seems to care. Slanguage and ebonics and street lingo have stormed the Bastille of our hallowed halls of grammar and punctuation. EVerybody seems to think they can be e.e. cummings and invent their own language rules while ignoring what has worked for centuries.

And now as a prooffreader for this esteamed newspaper, I find to my horror that even my collegues engage in astonishing punctuashun errors an careless gramatical mistakes that would lead me to think there english education consissted of making paper airplains and triangulur footballs when they shouldve been learning the fundamentals of their own langwage.

Commas are so often misused, they seem to pop up like weeds, and appear, at the wrong places in sentences, but then are lefft out when the punctuation rule calls for one. I realize journalism is not an exact scince. Somebody once said “Journalism is literture in a hurey.” And I agree with that, althrough I’d half to add that some of the speedyness in journalism gives it its zing. Still, journalist need to apreciate the rules of the language and pay respect to speling and punctuation and not alwasy be in s such a hurry to get those pages printed. We need to be kinder to the reader and not bombarde them with a litney of errors that will turn them away from reading. If I had a pennie for every type o I found in a newspapger, I’d be a rich man.

But it’s not about money. Its about honoring a craft and maintaining a stanadard of egcellence so future generations can read over what we’ve written and hopefully udnerstand what we were triing to acomplish. I think theres a well deserved plac ein heave for the people who respect the words they use and ttreat there language with dignity. Let’s try a little harder, shall we? To proofread those pages and make sure we don’t murder thee words we’re trying to make immortal. Get yourself a dictionery and gramar book and look back over the punctuation rules. with a little disipline hopefully we can set a example to those around us

(Beadle is a writer and teacher in Waynesville.)

 

Back to Top
The Smoky Mountain News