Posted on 02/24/2007 10:03:44 AM PST by rhema
"If I was President, this wouldn't have happened," John Kerry said during Hezbollah's war on Israel last summer. As 2004's Democratic presidential nominee should know, he should have said, "If I were President…"
It's sad, but hardly surprising, that the subjunctive evades someone of Kerry's stature. The English language is under fire, as if it strolled into an ambush. It would be bad enough if this assault involved the slovenly grammar, syntax, and spelling of drooling boors. But America's elites -- politicians, journalists, and marketers who should know better -- constantly batter our tongue.
The subjunctive, for instance, lies gravely wounded. Fewer and fewer Americans bother to discuss hypothetical or counterfactual circumstances using this verb mood. "This would not be a close election if George Bush was popular," Rep. Chris Shays (R.-Conn.) told reporters last summer, using "was," not "were." He erred further: "This would not be a close election if there wasn't a war in Iraq."
Similarly, a HepCFight.com newspaper ad declared: "If Hep C was attacking your face instead of your liver, you'd do something about it."
In an Ameritrade ad last year, a teenage girl begs her father for $80. "80 bucks?" he asks.
"Well, there's these jeans,” she replies, adding later: "There's these really cool shoes."
Forget the shopping spree. Dad should have sent his daughter upstairs without dinner until she mastered noun-verb agreement. Since they are plural, "there are" jeans and shoes, not "there's," the contraction for "there is."
This is a burgeoning linguistic blunder.
United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten told a Manhattan labor rally: "The muscle and the zeal that built our union is still with us." As a teachers' unionist, for crying out loud, Weingarten should know that muscle and zeal are still with us.
Likewise, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.- Nev.) said, "There was no terrorists in Iraq." Actually, there were, and Reid should have used that plural verb with those plural Islamofascists, even if he considered Baathist Iraq a terrorist-free zone.
In a taped, on-air promo, one cable news network's announcer said, "Inside the UN, there’s more than a thousand doors." No, there ARE more than 1,000 doors.
In another odd grammatical glitch, plural subjects of sentences interact with singular objects. Confusion follows. As one cable TV correspondent reported: "Every day, 1.5 million Americans ride a 747." Visualize the line for the bathroom on that jet. Make that "747s," and the turbulence vanishes.
Just before January's Golden Globe awards, a major newspaper's headline read: "Stars put their best face forward for the Globes." Wow! Eddie Murphy and Helen Mirren share a face?
A cable channel's news crawl correspondingly revealed: "Iraqi authorities find at least 21 bodies, many with nooses around their neck." Who knew so many Iraqis shared one neck?
Consider run-on sentences. A sign in a San Francisco M.U.N.I. streetcar recommends: "Please hold on sudden stops necessary." At the local airport, a men's room sign asks: "Please conserve natural resources only take what you really need."
Would it kill people to spell properly? A New York outdoor display company solicited new business by announcing in huge, black letters: "YUOR AD HERE."
A cable-TV news ticker referred to the "World Tade Center." Another explained that President Bush said he needs wiretaps "to defend Amercia."
Such sloth generates nonsense. Ponder these three items, all from cable-TV news crawls written by practicing journalists: Arab diplomats last August tried to change “a U.S.-French peace plan aimed at ending nearly a month of welfare.” Imagine if Hezbollah lobbed food stamps, rather than rockets, into Israel.
Another channel described a deadly, anti-Semitic attack at a Seattle “Jewfish” center.
And then there’s this beauty: “Disraeli troops kill two Hamas fighters” including one implicated “in the June capture of an Disraeli soldier.”
Today's explosion of rotten English should motivate Americans to speak, write, and broadcast with greater care, clarity, and respect for grammar and spelling. Also, when even college graduates in Congress, newsrooms, and advertising agencies express themselves so sloppily, America's education crisis becomes undeniable.
Is it pedantic to expect linguistic excellence? No. Unless Americans want English to devolve into an impenetrable amalgam of goofs and gaffes, protecting our language, like liberty itself, demands eternal vigilance.
Shoes, I'll give you. But 'jeans' is a problem.
You can't have one 'jean."
You might concentrate your criticism on the clerks who refer to a 'pant'.
Hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it...but..this is just a guess...maybe we hold our Interstates in greater esteem. I that statement grammatically correct? :)
That's because all the other early, limited-access highways were tollroads; usually called turnpikes.
When I was in high school (mid-80s), an English teacher grew so frustrated with our writing that he attempted to show us the mistakes by diagramming the sentences. He was quite disappointed when he realized none of us knew what he was talking about.
I would say that I am a better than average writer, but I have a lot of trouble explaining to someone why a sentence needs to be fixed. The best I can say is that it doesn't seem correct to me, or it sounds awkward. I think I have done so much reading in my life that I have internalized "correctness".
Unfortunately, I've been finding a lot of mistakes in books written in the last handful of years.
QUESTION: Is the appostophe denoting the possessive form in "world's" in the correct position?
Fate and the fickle tongue.
That should have been "apostrophe. Sorry.
He be rite.
SoCal is more and more hispanic influenced. More hispanic/latin newscasters and more slant to hispanic news. The signs of the times, I guess.
People say 'irregardless,' because, "really, really, regardless," is cumbersome.
"My favorite peeve is people using interrogative sentences for declarative ones in speech."
The single item in spoken English that most grates on my ear is the rising inflection at the end of a declarative sentence. I can't think how best to give an example in writing, save to say it leaves me mentally adding the unspoken "ya' know?' Valley-girlism that actually would turn the sentence into an interrogative one.
There are languages in which tonal inflections of individual words changes their meanings, sometimes dramatically. English was never meant to be one.
Do kids still have to learn how to diagram sentences? I bet not. That was one of my favorites from the old schooldays.
Explain please.
I, too, have noticed a lot of both grammatical and spelling errors in published books. I thought the publishers'/editors' proofreaders were supposed to be proficient in grammar since most of them, I would suspect, are college English majors.
The first time I heard that was in Flint, Michigan, c. 1978. I asked for directions and an old black guy told me, "..go past the Buick.."
He was referring to the Buick plant there.
I'm not completely sure, but I think it is. "Smartest woman in the world" seems almost a kind of compound noun, on the order of "The Secretary of State's interpretation was disputed." Maybe someone with a better grammar acumen than mine can give a more authoritative explanation.
"rising inflection.
"For those of you unfamiliar with this term, a rising inflection is where a person raises the pitch of their voice at the end, or even during a sentence, where it is not appropriate. In other words, people who speak in questions or ‘Up Talk’.
Thank you so much, gcruse for this article.
The article mentions that Australia is to be blamed for it, but who is to be blamed for the diffusion here in the States? When did exactly this form of speech take root here in America? I don't remember hearing it, say, 30-35 years ago.
I'm going to research this a little more, as I will not rest until I find the answers. Like the author of this article, I despise rising inflaction.
They do that instead of saying, ".., as any dumbass knows..."
Yes! Yes! Yes!
I'm always tempted to answer with, "I don't know?" :)
Caveat: English is not my first language.
When I am writing something important, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to re-write certain sentences to "sound right" to me. It sure would be easier to if I knew how to pinpoint the problem.
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