Lost Without Words

Author’s disclaimer:

WARNING!!! THIS STORY MAY CONTAIN INAPPROPRIATE LANGUAGE!!! JUDGE FOR YOURSELF IF YOU ARE CAPABLE OF READING IT!!! 

******

I think it is only fair to let you readers know that either you are going to read this and weep or you are going to miss the point entirely. If you are in the second group, this story could prove to be dangerous to your health. By this I mean that it could reinforce some already poor habits you may have. 

Unfortunately, I cannot accept any responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you cannot come to grips with your insufficiencies - a euphemism for other terms I would have preferred - then you are truly a lost cause. Or an idiot. No apologies for sounding harsh. If the truth fits, and hurts, you must wear it.

I am merely here to speak my mind. This desire to speak up has come about after years of trying to change and finally coming to the realization that I neither want to change nor find it possible to do so. Perhaps some of you would prefer me to remain silent because my behavior is shocking to you. Maybe it even seems aggressive. Or maybe you simply don’t care about the issue I’m about to present to you. You are welcome to your opinion.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t care much what you think, or whether you’re the majority and I’m a teeny tiny minority. You see, I’ve already suffered so much from trying to change my attitude about the issue and it hasn’t worked. It is that I know now that I am not the one who needs to change. In fact, I may be the last great hope of making things right, of putting the ship back on its proper course. I am willing to be a martyr for the cause, too. 

Someday people may even honor me, call me a hero. On the other hand, maybe they will call me despicable, arrogant, or obsessive-compulsive. However, before judgment is passed, just allow me to present my case. Walk for a while in my shoes. Have a little compassion. It has not been easy to be me. 

In the first place, I do not believe I am arrogant at all. Nor do I think I am brilliant or too smart for my britches. All I did was go to school and do the homework that was assigned. Certainly that was no crime. Learning is never a bad thing, right? Why is that so hard for people to understand?

However, you must admit that learning has gone out of style. Nobody wants to learn anything anymore. That is the source of the problem. If you don’t care about the dire straits we are in, please allow me to illustrate and in order to help you understand - because it’s probably impossible to convince you - just listen for a bit, despite your attention span.

I promise to keep it simple, go slowly, provide examples. Nothing complex or long-winded, since nobody can manage that nowadays.

Enter the apostrophe. English, which is such an intriguing language, has become overpopulated with it and a good half of English speakers no longer have a clue as to what its purpose is. Everybody says They don’t know, they never learned. All I can do is snarl and tell you to change that attitude. 

At the same time, and going hand in hand with the demise of the apostrophe, is the loss of parts of speech. Before we go on to those, however, I would like to remind you that by age seven - seven! - you should have known that the little comma-like mark is required for contracted verbs and most possessives, except for possessive pronouns. Yes, I’ve probably lost the majority of my readers by now, even if they’re over seven.

Note to self: Do not change. You are right on this. Stick to your guns.

Still, this ignorance, which is created by a failed educational system, is a real tragedy. I refuse to budge on the issue. It is the reason why I feel tremendous pity for plurals, possessives, possessive adjectives, subject pronouns, and a few of the verb tenses that were once known as perfect but are now ninety percent extinct. 

(Maybe you weren’t aware that such things as perfect tenses exist. They’re the ones that use have or had in them, like I have eaten or I had seen. They also have past participles, like eaten or seen, but that’s likely to be over many people’s heads. That is really not my problem. I do not need to change my position on this. After all, seven-year-olds used to know this.)

Prepositions might be out there somewhere as well, lurking in every sentence, near many a verb, but unless you know what to look for, their likely as scarce as hen’s and hens’ teeth nowadays. Some studied lists of them and were all the better for it.

Don’t get alarmed if you wouldn’t recognize a preposition if it bit you. Don’t brag about not knowing how to spot one, though. That’ll make me even angrier. We’ll sort this all out, with luck. Without luck, we’re all going to continue to go to hell in a hand basket. Don’t expect me to budge on this.

Contracted verbs are definitely limping along now too, and only a handful of people have even heard of them. You know, when a verb can be would not or wouldn’t, it is or it’s. The lovely little apostrophe simply indicates that the verb has been contracted, has lost a letter or two.

This contraction matters. If you don’t believe that, it’s - or it is - your problem, not mine. But let us - or let’s - move on.

Only a handful, albeit a larger handful, even stops to think about singular and plural, which are far easier to understand than contractions. Do you think about them? That devastating loss of singular = one and plural = more than one is not unrelated to the disappearance of verb tenses. Why bother, you might say, thinking about the past, present, or the future? Why clutter the brain with unnecessary things? 

All of the things I have just mentioned are no longer needed by many English speakers. We have spellcheck (or spellchek) and things of that nature to think for us. That also means the subjunctive is dead. (I am assuming you’ve heard the term subjunctive, although that might be wishful thinking.) Nobody knows the difference when a mother goes with her daughter to the doctor and says “I insist that she take her medicine” and “I insist that she takes her medicine.” Nobody but me, and I refuse to change. i want to keep my subjunctives, even if they are few and far between. They mean something.

It might be time to get down to brass tacks, to provide you with examples. Here is a brief list from a day’s (yes, it requires an apostrophe, it’s a possessive) stroll through twitter and other inane media platforms. Please note that being in a hurry is no excuse for stupidity. Anyway, all the samples are anonymous, although they are all real.

If you do not see what is wrong with the items below, I’m (contracted form of I am) not going to explain. Go back to second grade. You’ll find them there.

Reply’s (plural of reply, which by the way is a noun)

Partys (plural of party)

The Jone’s house (possessesive of surname Jones)

Kate flys to Montreal Third person singular of verb to fly,  following the plural formation rule every seven-year-old learned once upon a time)

He’d sellout his own mother (sorry, preposition out, your only a tail on a verb now) (Did you also notice he’d? Nice contracted verb.)

Can you find-out the answer? (sorry, preposition, u r an add-on and get a hyphen to emphasize that)

Your’s

Dont. Isnt. Wasnt. Hell. Well. Im.

Three Pine’s (a village in Quebec)

Guess this celebrities net worth

All y’all girlfriends dad’s are very smart

i (as in i wan’t 2 do it)

There their they’re (Two of these items are superfluous; it doesn’t matter if they are different parts of speech because parts of speech are a waste of time, as weve already established. Same goes for your and you’re.)

Orthography, aka spelling. Smartphones and the spellcheking thing do that for brains now. Which means no more worrying about led and lead and soon red and read will follow their lead.

Speaking of spelling, it is doubtful that anybody under fifty today knows the rule for words like believe, retrieve, receive, reign, weigh… which is: i before e, except after c; exceptions sound like A as in neighbor and weigh. Was that really so hard?

It appears that second-graders (I believe I have addressed this matter in earlier writings, but will forego or forgo the footnote so as not to clutter busy minds) no longer have time to learn to speak and read. 

Why bother to study such things if computers due that for the kids? If spellchek and phones are so smart? They certainly don’t have time to learn cursive, either. That must mean one thing: Calligraphy must die!

Speaking of writting, have you ever heard of a fountain pen? Have you ever seen one? Do you know about ink?

Freed from all that useless and impossible grammar, our minds are able to roam. No need to correct typos, checking our spelling for ourselves, or get or idioms rite. We scramble idioms constantly, by the way. Yet idioms used to be a means to figurative or more creative speech. Now we don’t even know what they mean. Not that anybody’s noticing (anybody’s being a contracted form).

We also can let our now-free fingers do the walking through video games or manage complex remote control devices for the television screen. And that’s not all…

Books are not necessary, since we never read them. Thank goodness - more room in the house for Dollar Store decor, the family budget increase’s exponentially (spelcheck just suggested increase’s), and libraries con be converted to public restrooms with facilitie’s for every sexuality and aesthetic.

Last but not least, because we all know it is exhausting to learn English well - exhausting and not that important - we are free from the requirement of schools and universities to learn another language. I say free, but it is actually because we can no longer do it. We don’t have the capacity to understand the agreement of person, gender, and number. We don’t ‘get’ tenses and we’ve agreed the subjunctive is worthless. We have so little lexicon (aka vocabulary aka words) that we can’t be bothered learning foreign terms.

All of this freedom is a load off our minds. We probably can communicate with the rest of the world in whatever they speak (altho by rights they should speak english) by using hand and facial gestures. We can go to the gym to work out, then show off our curves and muscles, which is easier and is a deeper means of expression than talking or writing. If communication is still too much of an effort and if we can manage to locate those people on the map, we can just bomb them. That always show’s whose boss. Whose smarter.

Nobody bothers to read maps anyway, now that you think about it. Not on a large scale, at least. What was the GPS invented for, anyway? Just worry about getting from Point A to Point B. It doesn’t matter where A and B are located. Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. Lots of people can’t find an address on the other side of the town where they live, or even three streets over. Why do we need maps when we have video games that tell us where to go?

And so, readers, thats where were at. Were losing the skills needed to use words correctly, to make sense of the world around us. Were loosing them and were loosing our minds. Not that it matters, bc we all understand what we mean.

However, Im not going to change my opinion about all this. U might think Im arrogant and smarter than you are so it seems easy to me, but I say if you dont care and you dont notice all the horrendous mistakes in this essay, yr in trouble. You are the ones who need to change.

The only thing I plan to do that I havent done before is to erase all the existing Schools of Education in Amerucan universities and rebuild them as something else or, better yet, plant flowers and vegetables where they once taught nothing.

Like with climate change, the clock is ticking on human language. 

It may have already met its end as far as english’s concerned.

R.I.P.(that’s not english, but it doesn’t matter; you know what I mean, yes?)

Ect.ect.