Posted on 12/05/2022 9:24:39 PM PST by SeekAndFind
English is a glorious language that has developed over a thousand years, borrowing from every other tongue as it goes, and developing strict rules to maintain maximum coherence. It is spoken around the world and is, therefore, the language of money and power. But to a White, middle-aged leftist English teacher, the English language she’s responsible for teaching to all students, regardless of race, color, creed, etc., is nothing more than an ugly White supremacist means of controlling people.
More than any language in the world, English is a portmanteau language—that is, it has cheerfully borrowed from every language with which English speakers have come into contact, creating a language of unusual richness and beauty. Over the millennia, it has absorbed myriad tongues into its Germanic core: Latin, Greek, the Romance languages, French, Hindu, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Swahili, and more. In this, it differs greatly from other languages. The French, for example, are proud that their language has calcified.
Over the same time, it has developed grammar rules that are intended to ensure the utmost clarity when communicating. Take, for example, one of my favorites, which is the rule against dangling or misplaced modifiers. There is a huge difference between “The girl in the red bathing suit watched a seagull flying by,” and “The girl watched a seagull flying by in a red bathing suit.”
I also like the rules saying that the wise writer avoids passive voice. Which sentence do you prefer? “The dog played with the child’s ball” or “The ball of the child was played with by the dog.”
Image: Title page of the original Webster’s Dictionary (1828) by Cullen328. CC BY-SA 3.0.
There are also structural rules that make communication better.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
That’s a good story - I like that. Kind of reminds me of when I was a kid (1990’s). There was no taint of hatred anywhere due to race or sex (not amongst us kids, anyway), and political correctness was still made fun of.
Talk about joy-sucking. Nothing is funny to those people unless it’s some expression of hate for someone they disagree with.
That is so true. Humor is an important coping mechanism for many things in life.
Can’t have any “coping” going on. Everyone has to be a “true believer” in some “thing”.
There is a funny segment from the Graham Norton show where Mila Kunis and other guests are discussing Russian. She is fluent and loves the Russian language, but they all, including her, think it hilarious when it is pointed out that it sounds like Klingon.
People are funny-both in the ways we do things right and wrong, the way we look and feel, both flattering and embarrassing, and the way we speak and act.
I tend to distrust and dislike people who are so uptight they can’t accept that.
Many years ago, we sent a letter to an Asian physician named Wong. I got a phone call directly from him, and he said it was regarding a patient who was not his, and completely deadpan, said “I think you sent it to the “wong” Wong.”
I nearly fell out of my chair! I never met him in person, but in my eyes, my estimation of him as a quality human being shot up in that simple one-minute conversation!
I respect that in a person, even when I have to struggle to laugh at myself sometimes...or maybe because I have to struggle at it...:)
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