I Thought This Was So Clever Just 3 Years Ago: Diatribe
Corruption in America is reaching, stretching out to a new high. Never before have the sacred institutions held so close to heart been so violently ravaged by the pale forces of ignorance and carelessness. Brace yourself, for I speak not in hyperbole; today it is simply frightful the level of disregard for the immutable laws of grammar and punctuation. This author personally spends endless nights dreading the direction the world is headed when entire sentences can be flown off without a single full stop. It leaves one shivering.
Consider quickly a curt comparison. Has it really been so long since the impeccable traditions of grammar and punctuation were strong in the blood of men? This first example is a lovely, expansive and exquisitely beautiful passage from the esteemed Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. List closely to his lucid prose.
“Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out—all of them writhing in agony except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more.”
Ah, any ear of even the slightest distinction would resonate with the peaceful beauty of Hardy’s words. His subject-verb agreement is simply delicious, his modifiers placed with precision. Atop that, he dared to reach the epitome of style by using not one but two of the more tricky punctual symbols, a semi-colon and dash, with thoughtless grace. Society would do well to look to him as not only a literary but a moral idol, but, alas, the insurmountable difficulty of human irrationality has turned us from this noble goal.
Consider now, instead, a more “modern” rendition of the above. The author, wishing to remain unnamed, was barely able to coerce the potent imagery into the fractured language of choice. Conclusively, I’d give the rendition a 9 for effort, but mostly out of pity.
“under teh trees wuz phesents!! … lol … they wer chilln with there tizight fethers (ROFL!) bt omg ewww there fethers wer all bloody!!!1 … l8r, i thotz mayb they were dead!!!! and twitchy…… i mean WTF!!?!1 its like, i dunno, they like couldnt tkae nemore that nite!”
If analysis of this passage were even feasible, it’d still not be worth the minute amount of effort it might take to reject it on all fronts. Faced with this breed of incompetence in the young, it is simply foolish to be optimistic about the future, it will clearly be nothing at all similar to the world of today.
Any respectable and informed person should ask now why, why now are those great friends to language, the period, the comma, the semicolon, now forsaken? For what reason does my good friend Mr Exclamation Mark let himself be so abused? It brings me nearly to interrobangs in my fits of anger and confusion, buffered only by the slim satisfaction of an understanding comprehensive to the richness of the English language and disdainful of the uninitiated.
This author, speaking from not research but instead a careful eye and wit determines the cause best to be attributed to smaller things than the normal culprits of a immediate satisfaction society and an electronic forum which hasty writing can be praised within. It is my opinion instead that the fallocy inflicted upon linguistic understanding is fostered entirely by the invention of the keyboard. It is a far cry from the safe haven of pen and ink, where handwriting and patience were taught just as readily as the ABCs and the advanced uses of passive voice within parallel structure necessitated by increasingly complex sentence structure – all of which necessary to youngsters in preparatory schools. Indeed, even the typewriter straddled the edge between patience and carelessness by its annoying inability to erase mistaken strikes with ease. No, only now with the growing popularity of typing, typing in the sense of an electronic keyboarding device and its respective computational box, does language degrade. Only now when one can expectorate a flurry of glyphs and send it merrily across the globe, ten-thousand miles, in less than the bat of an eyelid has the coordination between the brain and the tongue grown so tenuous. Personally, this author cannot see why anyone would even partake in the use of such a terrible invention. Under no circumstances should one type what can more readily be written.
But alas! These are the days we now live in – a world uninhibited by those fading traditions and ceremonies. No longer does the pen mean what it used to – a measure of respect, a tool of a subtle trade, or a sword balanced tenderly in the fingers of an artist, ready to strike and parry the blows of wit drawing thin dark gashes across an unbroken field of purity.
So, in closing, I leave you with this. Today, some might think that a minor gramatical slip, a split infinitive, a comma splice, a mere disjointed tense, is something truly insignificant – an artifact of a time before fancy vacuum tubes and wires could mimic the subtleties of communication – but they are most certainly incorrect. It is clear to me, as it is to any who really listen to the language of the world, that precision in grammar and punctuation are clearly the defining factors of a balanced mind – one so capable of writing something cogent, something worthwhile, something remarkable.
March 2006.
(I used to just love double satire.)
