The Death of the English Language

“You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.”

~ President George W. Bush, Feb. 21, 2001

I’m afraid I have bad news to pass on. One of our most beloved cultural traditions has passed away. For many of us, it allowed us to talk to other members of our nation and some in the international world. With this tragic death, our ability to communicate in a clear and concise manner is now in dire jeopardy.

English Language
R.I.P.
5th Century – 21st Century

Yes, I’m being facetious here, but my point is valid. There is a conscious mindset in the (American) English speaking world, predominately by the younger generations, that being able to spell or speak the language properly is not important, especially once you begin discussing the use of language online. With this apathetic mindset, the death of the language begins.

While online in games or on forums, you can’t throw a letter “Y” without seeing countless atrocious errors in spelling and grammar. No one is perfect when it comes to spelling, and when you’re talking about the online experience, typos are to be expected. The only danger in always ignoring your errors is when you do need to be perfect, either in school or more importantly the professional environment, you will find yourself falling into the same habitual errors you are used to shrugging off. You will not simply cease all of your bad grammar habits magically.  And I hate to break it to you- spelling and grammar checkers don’t catch many issues. You’re on your own.

Don’t believe me? Turn on cable news and watch the ticker for half an hour. I know one day I counted approximately 24 errors in spelling, grammar and omitted words. 24 errors in 30 minutes? On a major news source? No boss in any environment should (or will) find that acceptable. Nor should you. There are examples of this kind everywhere you look- schools, billboards, TV shows… listen to the speeches our last President gave- bless the dictionary, he made words up and horrendously butchered simple grammatical phrases (see the quote at top)! Fair or not, people do judge other people’s writing and speaking as a large indicator of their level of intelligence.

You don’t agree that your IQ is judged by your online linguistics? Tell me, which of the following people would you assume is more intelligent, if you’d never met them and just read the following conversation online:

Person A.) “u no I can spell grate when I want too- its not like i do this in at werk.”

Person B.) “I’m afraid that’s untrue. If you’re used to making those types of errors, you’ll make them in other areas of your life, costing time- which is money.”

Obviously, not only is person “B” far more clear in your ability to understand, you absolutely will believe that person is more intelligent. It’s not to say they are, but the judgment will occur. And who wants to present themselves to others as (possibly) stupid? This is all something easy to overcome! With the spell checking tools available online, many of these simple spelling errors can be eliminated just by right clicking on the word with your mouse! Often you don’t even have to retype a word- just click and select the correct spelling! And if you’re online, please tell me- if you don’t know how to spell a word- why is it so hard to go to dictionary.com and look it up? You don’t even need to go to the site- just type how you think the word is spelled in your browser address bar and Google will magically take you to a dictionary site – or provide the correct spelling for you to copy and paste!  Dirt simple! The point is- you should want to correct your spelling errors.

What of grammar, though? Spell checkers do not catch the majority of grammar errors. This is shown all too often in those who rely on them to solve all of their writing woes. We’re not speaking of perfection in grammar. Active/passive tense, phrasing of sentences… some aspects of grammar cause professional writers to balk every day. Instead we’re talking basic grammar that everyone should know. One quick solution for improvement is making sure you understand homonyms and possessives.

Let’s start with homonyms. Homonyms are words that sounds alike but mean different things. For instance, “steak” and “stake”. I don’t know about you, but I certainly wouldn’t wish to try eating a stake. Even with ketchup. There are many homonyms in English, but you can vastly improve your language skills simply by understanding the top five most used ones.

At the top of that list? Words such as there / their / they’re. If you’re going to travel to another destination, you’re going to go there. If someone has or owns something, it is their item. And if your friends went to the bar an hour ahead of you, they’re likely already drunk. Sound insulting and basic to you? Look around online- you’ll be surprised how common these words are incorrectly substituted for each other.

Possessives are constantly being misused. One of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of knowledge surrounding “your” and “you’re”. It’s extremely easy to master this, and makes you instantly look 100 times more intelligent! “You’re“ is a contraction. It stands for “you are”. Always. In every case. (I had someone argue this point with me once, to their great embarrassment when 50 people corrected them.)

Tell me- when you consider “you’re” stands for “you are”, does it make any sense at all to see the sentence, “Your stupid!” Absolutely not! When I see someone say something of the sort, my first response is “I don’t own a stupid!” or “My stupid did what?” Not so coincidentally, the original speaker never quite understands my response. Get in the habit of reading contractions out in your head- when you see “you’re”, your mind should be auto-translating to “you are”. Once you begin doing this, you’ll rarely make mistakes of this sort again.