Don't Quote Me.......Failing our Children: Doesn't it Enrage You?

I subtitled a post "Don't quote me" a while back because I wanted to make it clear that what I was expressing was my own - vehement - opinion/idea which was not representative of any group or affiliation. Feel the need to to add this to the same category.

 

  One afternoon, in 2016, I saw on my Youtube page that there was a televised debate between two American contenders for the presidency. Needing a break from the piece I was writing, and with the realisation that my outlook was becoming rather insular as I struggled to understand the Homeland I'd recently settled in, I poised my mouse and clicked.

I can still remember the shock of that introduction to contemporary America; in fact I was in a state of shock for the rest of the afternoon. The spectacle of two grown - in fact elderly - people shouting, yelling, talking over each other, using personal abuse (and, dear gods, one actually stalking the other around the podium!) horrified me.  I was involved in a form of televised verbal abuse! What exacerbated this feeling was that the Moderator - he whose job it was to control the proceedings - sat largely unruffled by this exhibition; apart from a few half-hearted requests (requests!) in a voice which was easily drowned out by the flow of playground insults and bad manners.

That was the day I began a private on-going investigation into how language is being used, manipulated, dumbed down, and, most distressingly of all; employed as a cudgel, a blunt instrument, rather than a valuable tool. How it's becoming weaponised to a point where discourse between people who do not wholly agree with each other in every particular is becoming impossible. 

I have always told my students that one of the reasons the English lexicon was so vast was that there was a word for everything. Obviously, this was in discussions not simply about the naming of objects, but the communication of ideas, feelings, opinions, concepts & philosophies. It - the English lexicon - enabled clarity; it made it possible to raise conversation & discussion from the personal to the objective; to hold differing opinions without holding bias towards the people who don't agree with them; to be concise; to see our fellows as people not enemies; to show courtesy and exhibit dignity  to those whose world-views differ - 'to  transmit information, thought, or feeling so that it is satisfactorily received' to paraphrase a Merriam Webster entry.

It's only recently that I have begun to explore the language use of those who have been the passive recipients of this degradation of  language, to see how it impacted communication in social spaces. The speed with which this has happened is breathtakingly obvious across all lines of public communication .

In the very early days of the previous American administration someone used the word "pled" as the past tense of the verb "to plead".  I was heartened by the fact that Rachael Maddow, an American news commentator, isolated and commented on this usage with an explosive giggle before pointing out there was no such usage as "pled".

 By the end of that Admin's term, the word 'pled' was being used on news broadcasts, in opinion pieces, in televised court proceedings...and by Rachel Maddow.

A quick perusal of the pages of You-tube, Twitter, Facebook and Google Scholar drastically illustrates how quickly language has degraded. 

Not many people notice or even care that the word "than" is being used to replace the preposition 'to' in the collocation "different to...". The response by the majority is "Than"? "To"? what does it matter...we all understand.

Ok, but what about "theres"? It's only a few months since this (non)word has spread like a fast-acting virus, across the 'net. Thousands of people who never mastered the difference between 'there' and 'their' gave up the fight earlier this year - and the constant confusion with 'i before e' became a thing of the past: 'there' became the default spelling regardless of the intended meaning. Thus years of privately feeling silly because no-one ever taught you why or how to use an apostrophe have now been set aside: "theres" is fine because 'everybody knows what you mean'.

This, inevitably, has led  within the last few months, to it becoming common usage to write plurals with an apostrophe 's'. The term "Grocer's apostrophe" bit the dust when it became 'offensive'; explanation of the use of the possessive became 'pedantic' and even people who continued to strive to separate the possessive from the plural breathed a sigh of relief when the evidence of the printed word proved to them, in post after post, that plurals take an apostrophe.

But: does everybody still know what you mean? Well no, they don't, because you haven't been able to write what you mean.  I've had to have two - or sometimes more - readings of many posts to understand that what is meant differs from what is written.

Working against being understood however, is the fact that the anti-science, anti-academic sector  has now become a powerful and growing influence on public discourse, and so that it's those who use English well who are singled out by much of the on-line crowd.

Those who know how to use language are now part of the elite. 'Elite' in its turn has become a synonym for "Other", "Them", "Enemy"...as well as  'wanker', 'tosser' or 'cunt'. Using English the way the most vocal of people on-line use it  guarantees acceptance; functioning in the same way that particular slangs, creoles, technical & military vocabulary do - it bonds.

But our language isn't coping. To make a positive comment far too many people have only awesome or cool in their toolkit. To comment unfavourably is to use some form of the verb ' to disgust'. To replace any or all of these, either "Shit!" or "Fuck!" are equally apposite. While to express any emotion from slight annoyance to incandescent rage, with anything or anyone, many are forced to rely solely on 'hate'.

Sadly the inability of so many people to express themselves coherently in their own native language makes communication  - not just on-line but increasingly increasingly in public - a morass of misunderstanding; grammatical errors that indicate the opposite of what is meant; offence taken because of lack on punctuation. The words "truth" and "lies" no longer having fixed meaning.

I read to-day the first indication that there might be some acknowledgement by education overseers that we are doing our children a disservice. One as grave as the ravaged planet we're leaving them to cope with: -  we are not adequately educating them. We aren't equipping them equally with skills to survive in the evolving world. We are not encouraging them all to take their future into their own hands. We are not empowering them even to try.

We are merely testing their memories.

It shames us all.