Me fail English? That unpossible ...
Posted on 09/27/2010 3:36:14 AM PDT by Daffynition
The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.
The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.
The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.
In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Shouldn’t this have been written in French?
But, u no, it ain't gonna happen 4 a long time.
Ending a sentence on a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Hint: it's also shoo-in, not shoe-in.
Okay, I know you're anxious to jump right in and start speaking English, but there's a couple of things I need to know first, because I've never done this before. So, how many of you would say you speak English fairly well, but with some difficulties?
A little English?
Yes? You speak some English?
Son of Beetch.....Sheet!
[Class in unison] Son of Beetch.....Sheet!
I was just sayin’. You didn’t have to go all Chrononhotonthologos on me....
I recall one such creature "correcting" a letter I once wrote to the Mercury-News, replacing the appropriate "arrant" with the inappropriate "errant," with a predictable and deleterious effect on the semantic content of the sentence. This was not so much an evil plot of a liberal rag (which it is) to obscure the golden prose of a conservative correspondent (which I am) but more a case of a well-meaning ignoramus intent on dragging his readers down to his level. Nevertheless, it was my name that appeared beneath. No literate jury would ever convict me for continuing the editorial discourse with a fire axe.
All that is in the keeping of an ordinary citizen is to do the best that he or she can, armed with computer-based, automagical spell-checkers holding skimpy 10,000-word lexicons, and dependent on an occasionally faulty memory for the rules of grammar and syntax that are yet beyond mechanical aid, thank God. One might hope for more professional standards from a professional. One might also hope for the Easter Bunny to poop chocolate eggs.
That is today’s public education system!!!! Post of the day!
LLS
Here’s some words and phrases I’d like to see die. Just listen to conversations and interviews and see how overused these are:
Absolutely
“you know…”
“I mean…”
“I was like...”
“just so you know…”
Constantly ending a statement with “OK ?”
“do you know what I’m saying ?”
“Use of good for well. The poor adverb died years ago.”
Conversation heard today: “How are you?” “I’m good, and yourself?”
Ugh.
Its like awesome texting!
I miss The *Bills* ....Buckley and Safire.
If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.
~William Safire
And yet they find it odd we cancel our subscriptions and change the channel...
LLS
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.