I am back

 I do not know why it bothers me so much. I do have a strong, visceral reaction. In fact, I cringe. I have no logical physiological explanation. Maybe it is because I was a teacher my entire adult life. I made my living with words, translating them, defining them, and exploring their underlying assumptions. I demanded precision in that process. There were precise steps that needed to be followed: what is the root meaning, what is the grammatical form, and what does the word mean in its context.          

 The grammatical structures of languages came easy to me. Memorizing vocabulary was not as easy. I was clearly not in favor of the decision made around 1985 to stop teaching grammar. I don’t know why I react when I hear something like, “me and her went to the movies”. I understand what it means. It has the same meaning as “she and I went to the movies.” If I get the meaning, even though the grammar is skewed, then should I not be concerned about the incorrect grammar?  It is meaning that matters in communication. Yet I still cringe. I expect more from educated people. I want them to be precise in their use of language. I take pride in the fact that I try to speak “correctly”. If I was interviewing someone for a job, and they did not care about the precise use of language, I would probably assume that they do not care about being precise in anything. Is it laziness? Is it easier to speak without having to be concerned with grammar? Is “we had went” easier to say than (then?), “we had gone”? 

 Or is the use of incorrect grammar a protest? That assumes that I know the rules of grammar but choose not to apply them. In school, since my subject was a foreign language, I taught grammar and was expected to speak grammatically correct. To show that I do not accept the norms of society, especially a society that I deem to be corrupt, I can refuse to use that “correct” language. Was Aretha Franklin protesting the white establishment by singing “yes it do” in her rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”? If it was a protest, was the goal to allow people to speak without correct grammar to show that correctness is racist, the white man’s way of speaking? This seems to be the opposite of being politically correct today, something that I struggle with (or to be more correct, with which I struggle). If it was intended as a protest against correct language, then it succeeded. Incorrect language is everywhere. Even though it may have succeeded, what was accomplished? Racism is still rampant in the United States. 

I am not a linguist or philologist, so I cannot completely understand the process that led to the decision to remove grammar from the English curriculum. As a result, I still continue to wonder how the loss of grammatical correctness spread so wide and so fast. As a teacher, did I have the lofty expectations that my students should display their education through the correct use of language? Looking at it this way, I do not see it as a racial issue. The use of certain language distinguishes the educated from the un-educated. As I told my students, I like to use big, fancy words because they make me look smart. There are both educated and un-educated in all races. Is the loss of grammatically correct speech an indictment against our education systems? Did teachers fail the students by not getting them to speak with correct grammar, or did the students fail the teachers by not caring? Did poverty and the poor schools force them not to care? Or was there just a consensus that grammar should not be a priority when there are so many more important subjects to teach? 

Or, am I looking at it the wrong way? Am I so imbued with nationalism that E Pluribus Unum relates to language as well? As Americans, should we all speak the same American language, with its arbitrary determination of what is correct? Maybe I should applaud the diversity of dialects as a strength of our country? Does my ability to say “we had gone” instead of “we had went” show that I have superior skills in other areas as well? Socrates, in The Apology, argues that it is a human weakness to think that just because someone has superior skills in one area makes them an expert in all areas. Does being a quarterback in the NFL quality a person to be vice president? 

 As much as the loss of grammatical skills makes me cringe, there is an epidemic that is far worse for me. For lack of a better term, I will call it the “like virus”. It has spread and infested first the young, and now it has reached my generation, the baby boomers. My analogy is the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  People go to sleep speaking normally, and when they wake up, they are another person, a person who somehow has to use the word “like” in every sentence. We again go back to the 1980’s. As grammar was declining, the use of like was expanding. According to the Oxford Dictionary (https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/), it is now used in informal speech as well. When this new informality does not mean to “say”, it is used strictly as a filler. In other words, when there is nothing to say, say “like”. An example that I hear constantly: “he’s like, ‘where are you’ and I’m like, like watching tv.” 

 I tried to determine scientifically how widespread the infection is. I had to drive my daughter and a group of her friends to Atlantic City. My experiment was to determine if I could drive the same miles per hour to keep up with their likes per hour. One girl in particular caused me to speed. She began each sentence with, “like, like, like”, and then would describe a conversation as “he’s like and she’s like and I’m like, like, like like. Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for the “like” virus. In fact, it is still spreading. As a teacher, I tried to remedy bad grammar by “learning them good”. In the meantime, since this new, appalling use of like will never disappear, I am searching for a remedy for my own illnesses, although I do not think I will ever find it. 

 So, I guess I will just have to like live with it.