Guest Post by PF Whalen
For those of us who pay attention to such things, over the past several years we’ve seen a noticeable decline in the proper use of the English language in our culture. What once would have been considered embarrassing grammatical errors within online news articles are now commonplace; so much so, we can only conclude that publishers either don’t care about quality or were stoned during most of their high school English classes.
The phenomenon, unfortunately, isn’t limited to online news. Online retailers seem incapable of, or indifferent to, punctuation. Basic sentence structure and syntax appear to elude television producers responsible for chyrons and text boxes. And if we spend only a few minutes perusing social media posts, it becomes clear that a significant portion of our population doesn’t understand the difference between their, there, and they’re. Anyone who was educated in a Catholic school can hear a nun in the back of their head tut-tutting and lamenting the decay of our educational standards. But if you think the state of affairs with the English language in America is bad now, just wait… there about to get allot worser.
In an effort to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of The Woke, many of our institutes of higher learning have decided to either minimize or disregard the importance of grammar and spelling. The University of Nebraska proudly declares that they “advocate for writers from historically marginalized or oppressed groups and for writing that counters traditional accounts of ‘standard’ academic English by extending conceptions of audience, purpose, and meaning.” A well-written and articulate statement that translates as, “we will no longer require well-written and articulate writings from students if we like the color of their skin.”
Not to be outdone, Rutgers University’s English Department has declared, “writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage;” a statement even more eloquent than its counterpart from Nebraska, but equally absurd.
Such idiocy isn’t limited to the Big Ten Conference, unfortunately, with examples readily available across the fruited plain. Consider, for instance, the University of California San Diego which explains ”We understand that language is political and that silence is complicity.” No professors, language is not political. Sorry, but no. Language is simply a system of communication; a tool. Language can be used to make political statements, but language – any language – is merely an instrument for conveying thoughts. The only ones who believe language itself is political are sheltered, self-admiring loafers from academia who do nothing but smoke dandelions, wonder if rocks are happy or sad, and view every aspect of our society through the prism of race.
It’s unclear, exactly, which specific grammatical standards are being ignored; and practices likely vary by institution. This approach is a major mistake, and one which we must hope doesn’t spread. One of the most damaging byproducts of the current culture war plaguing our country is the dramatic decrease in commonalities that bind us. With sports that once united us, millions of Americans have instead divorced themselves from the NFL and NBA due to those leagues’ radical shifts toward leftism and their willingness to weigh-in on anything remotely political. Millions more are now giving up on Major League Baseball. Our military has become hyper-politicized, and so has entertainment options such as movies, TV shows, and virtually all genres of music.
But at least we still have our language: English. Yes, we have different accents, and different parts of the country have distinctive idioms and idiosyncrasies, but most Americans speak English. And those who aren’t fluid in English usually strive to learn it, despite the best efforts of the left to compel them to do otherwise.
English is omnipresent in America, and lingual features such as spelling and grammar have been equally universal. How words are spelled has been non-debatable, precise, and critical to ensuring we communicate our thoughts properly. Structuring sentences accurately by including a predicate and subject in each, and by positioning adverbs and adjectives appropriately, allows each of us to understand one another even though we may simultaneously display our uniqueness. But what happens now? Are we going to have different sets of rules based on the color of our skin? Are we going to have no rules for one group, and stringent rules for another?
It would be one thing if this effort was aimed at the finer points of our language. For instance, ending a sentence with a preposition (which, incidentally, is something up with which none of us should put) may be a literary faux pas, but such infractions aren’t particularly concerning. With these recent efforts by leftists in academia, however, there appears to be neither standardization nor objectivity. Applying such policies will be left, no doubt, to the whims of individual professors; leaving students confused and less-educated, regardless of their melanin levels.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this attempted rewriting of linguistic imperatives is the bigotry. Rather than correcting students on improper word usage, we’re now going to nod in agreement if those students are from a race we consider to be victimized. Why? Does the left believe black students are incapable of properly conjugating verbs simply because they are black? Are Hispanic students inherently inept at correctly placing adjectives?
The ideology that gave us participation trophies has now graduated to lecturing us about “black linguistic justice.” The geniuses who insist that the “gender identity” of a baby is unknowable are now seeking to abolish “White Mainstream English.” And the gang which argues that defunding police departments will somehow improve the lives of those they’re trying to help have graduated to preaching about “a climate of racialized inferiority toward Black Language.”
All of these efforts are being undertaken in the name of anti-racism when in reality they are the epitome of true racism. Lowering the bar for students based on their skin color while endeavoring to improve their communication skills is not helping them. We have a language, a common language, and that language is neither a Black Language nor a White Language nor a Brown Language. It’s the English language. Instruct all students on the correct usage of that language, regardless of their race, and stop your silly virtue signaling and identity politics.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
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Amen!
maff gramer anspelin is raycis an shit.
muthafukka!
The author is not looking at the positives from the destruction of our language. With all the Progressives talking jumbled English we will know as soon as someone opens their mouth if they are worth listening to. This will be almost as effective as making all liberals wear blue hats and sweatshirts with the name Asshole stitched across the front.
You think the tube is hard to watch now, just wait…
In 1996, the Oakland School Board in Oakland, California passed a resolution regarding a linguistic variety known as “ebonics.” Ebonics — a portmanteau combining the words ebony and phonics — is a dialect which linguists refer to as African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
Is that different than Jive?
Klassick.
Sherman Billingsley’s cousin’s wife. Sherman’d dad was a Okie bootlegger. Son sold it legally at his place in NYC…The Stork Club.
In the early ’80s, some school administrator in Charlotte was trying to promote teaching in ebonics in the public schools there. The local PBS station had a short program on it. A black grammar school student was allowed to make a statement as justification for the idea. He said this about his white teacher, “Time I fine out what she tawn ’bout, she be done flonk me”.
People familiar with Charlotte’s black dialect will need no translation. I think that’s what the administrator meant by “ebonics”.
What to do? The left defined the language over 50 years ago. When they defined the words and set the tone of communication without push back, they won. It is funny to listen to people on Talk Like a Pirate Day. But not so much listening to blacks speaking non standard English.
Conservatives should take back the English language. This won’t work until all conservatives rise up and say enough. Refuse to not use words that the left says is unacceptable. Make every day talk like a nigger day. Let the left know that if this is to be accepted by one it should be accepted by all. If someone gets offended the reply is to tell them to fuck off as they have been telling conservatives for years. Soon if everyone speaks offensively the offensive words will be normalized and lose their sting. Use standard English until confronted by leftists.
It is crude and something one wouldn’t want to use amongst conservatives but the only way to let the left know that they can’t define the language.
While in school my English teacher had us read Edwin Newman’s “A Civil Tongue” and “Strictly Speaking”. He is dead and other than selling books that the choir read, he made no lasting impact on correcting our language. He shoveled sand against the sea.
The best way to combat this is not engage with leftists by not supporting their schools, actors, media, companies or locations. It would be a long slog.
On further thought, forget it. It won’t work. The Z man had an article on separating between blue and red zones with red encircling urban blue. If the left were cancer then it must be erased 100% as they aim to do to us.
And conservatives will accomplish that with strongly worded articles and comments.
Pat Buchanan has been writing strongly worded articles for the last 5 decades and has won none of the left over. They don’t care. He makes his daily bread by writing to the people that already agree with him. An echo writer.
Sillies, soon it won’t matter since Spanish will be the lingua franca of the land and English, being white supremacist, will eventually go the way of the Dodo. Orwell’s newspeak will replace former conversational English and soon no one will have the capability of expressing anything other than simple word combinations, like what toddlers do.
Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual’s ability to think and articulate “subversive” concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.
Spanish (and Portuguese) is a European language and therefore White supremacist as well. Quichua and Guaraní are the only Western Hemisphere indigenous languages that are still widely spoken.
American Spanish is pretty much ebonics, too.
This statement is leftist nonsense. Like all languages, it is much more than a tool for communication. It reflects the unique culture, history, mythology, biology, and thinking patterns of White European peoples who contributed to its creation and evolution.
Well…yes many, if not most, Blacks are incapable of conjugating verbs, a matter which they, understandably, consider entirely irrelevant to their lives, even when they are taught otherwise.
Furthermore, Mesoamerican “Hispanics” probably are innately less adept than Whites at correctly placing adjectives. Even highly intelligent educated Asians have trouble with English syntax and do not consider our article adjectives particularly useful.
The author is correct to lament the intentional degradation of our English language, but he does seem mired in leftist notions which deny the reality of inherent racial differences.
I knew the writing was on the wall when, I became primary.
When I was in the quasi indoctrination centre (school), they taught us, Anne and I went to the park.
Now it is, me and Anne went to the park.
The me generation was born.
Listen to any of the sportsball players talk and tell me I am wrong.
That was my first thought.
Back when we had cable, I’d have sport center on just as background noise.
When the post-game interviews came around, I would perk up and concentrate on trying to understand what the fuck they where talking about.
It was either deciding whether to take the inside fastball or remodel the bedroom closet.
I couldn’t be sure.
Yeah, like the one from Rock Hill SC who murdered his doc, doc’s wife, their 5 & 9 yr old grandkids plus someone else before suicide. His dad said something to the effect that “he had problems”.
Saw it on Fawx, doubt it got mebbe 2-3 15 sec mentions on Commie NN.
Fatman – I guess you missed the days they taught punctuation.
Gday mate. I don’t think I’m doing too bad, for an ESL student.
The beginning of the end was the invention of the iPad. It had a terrible effect on grammar: iPad, youPad, he/she/it/zePad….
Although we don’t subscribe, we get a copy of “The Beaufort (SC) Gazette” every morning in our mailbox. It has the NYT Xword puzzle in it, so I assume they own the paper. Those are getting more and more PC as well. Political clues always about Libtards, black acting roles, rappers, etc.
The OpEds in it are horrid as well. One from the Chi Trib about how a lifelong Braves fan says ATL got what it deserved and time to drop Braves. ATL Crackers? Raycists? Guidestones? Hell, move the franchise to Waynesboro GA and name them the “Birddawgs”. Locals will get it…
BTW, Ty Cobb has, to this date, been slandered as a Raycist. Hell, 99.99% of honkys were back then. But, he left his estate to a hospital system. In today’s valuation, it was around $600-700MM, mostly in Coke stock.
Oh, the admins changed its name to something crappy years ago. It used Cobb’s name priorly. I wonder if his small museum in Royston is still open.
Promotion of the black gangster/thug culture has had the most influence on American English, IMO. Young whites try to emulate the thugs by using their ridiculous patois. The “woke” bullshit is from the gangster vernacular. Blocks say “woke” instead of awake, and “sleep” instead of asleep. When I was a young man, black songwriters used much better English than today’s rappers, most of whom probably couldn’t actually write down their own verse.
There was a passage in one black group’s song back then that made a joke of how some people have no idea how to use “I” or “Me” and fall back on “Myself” when unsure. The singer said “Somebody knocked and I said ‘Who’s there?’ He said ‘It’s me’, and I said,’ Well, come in, Myself’.
Tell an English teacher about that lyric and see if he or she gets it. Not many these days will, I’d bet.
Loosers! Morans!
The decline of western civilization will not only be televised, it will be actively encouraged.
Spell check has always been an irritant to me as it has no way of knowing context, people type a word that is spelled correctly yet is not the right word. Eye think that eye should sea the world.
It is pretty tough. I think this really went downhill with the introduction of technology. First e-mail, then instant messaging, then texting.
It is not that people just don’t know grammar or can’t read cursive. They can’t even type anymore. When you had to write or type a letter, then mail it, it was an investment of time, and reflected on you personally. Now you fire off a text or comment, and save time by using deliberate misspellings.
Everything is immediate today, and folks growing up in that climate probably will never learn the difference. If Chyrons are for breaking news, they are just trying to get the thing up on screen, and won’t bother with an editor.
Not that I am justifying it. It seems to me that an integral part of education is the ability to edit your work in your own language.
But when not just language, but responsibility, quality, punctuality, honesty, reliability, and loyalty are all signs of racism, you know it is not just technology.
Someone is trying to take down your civilization.
Signs were sung over the top, a little, by the five-man electrical bunch, but even before that, way before that, I saw signs with quite proper bullet holes thru ‘em the length & breadth of this land. Proper plinkers may be fewer nowadays, esp relative improper ones, but ebb will not likely flow to extinction.
There’s a crack in everything. But if by chance a proper bell jar vacuum comes along, ring it, crack it, that’s how the light, not to mention breathable air, gets in – & maybe, just maybe, how a Sylvia Plath gets out alive, for a little longer, anyway. Anthem (covers…i like ol’ Leo, but sometimes you feel like lugubrious, sometimes you don’t, hallelujah):
The infrastructure-sky is falling? What about(ism ain’t always a fatal fallacial) the firmament that was demolitioned before the skull-*uck Babel Tower introrection?
I was the Spelly Table king, but a freak did indeed beat my hand. A legally ordained & unionized teacher freak, conducting the spelling bee gave the word, “flow.” Jesus, what a pitiful word to be bee’d. f-l-o-w. “No. FLOW.” F-l-o-w. “Sit down, boy!” Next kid inherited that s/wind/le, “f-l-o-o-r,” & lived to translate another round. That was the English teach at that school. The math teach usta’ assign pages, put his feet up, & sip from a brown paper bag. Things got even more picaresque in universe-satay (Einstein’s bit comparing/contrasting stupidity-on-a-pogo-stick & the universe…damn…still tastes like chicken).
The fun to be had with the nonsense that is state schooling (training) flows, floor-up, outta’ the fun that precedes it, tho: parents handing the kiddos off to the kidnappers for surfactant stockholm syndroming & candied Manchurian candidacies. Yeah, abuse is a generational dowry that keeps on delivering, right? But John Taylor Gatto could only describe it, not defeat it, & sew goes that circle that prides itself on not plinking properly.
“Growing Up
Itinerary: Morning to Noon
The Language of Childhood
How to write about growing up? As children, especially as young children, we are too busy actually growing up to be able to put this experience into the distanced & interpretive frames of language & narrative. Not only are the great stories about childhood always written by adults looking back, remembering, perhaps inventing, perhaps fantasizing, but childhood itself might best be understood as an adult construct, a retrospective adult project. For starter, what would be the language of childhood? The French writer Georges Bernanos, late in his life, seeking to visualize the entry of his soul into the afterlife, saw himself as a child – “l’enfant que je fus” – as the deadest of his dead, yet leading the way, even though irretrievable. And on the far side of words. Is it too much to claim that language itself is the price we pay for leaving childhood, the conversion of wonder into grammar? Or could we, alternatively, see language as prize, as central attainment & means of empowerment in the process of growing up?
These matters are at once primitive & abstruse. Anyone who has seen the vibrancy of children at play senses the gap (in beauty & power) between “being” & “speaking.” And that may be the least of it, for language also heralds a regime of deferral & translation. The immediacy of experience is exchanged for the mediation of words. We exit the garden into a realm of signs. Consider, in this regard, the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw his fundamental life crisis in just these colors. Retelling his life from the vantage point of age & retrospect (in Les Condession), Rousseau recalls the life-altering episode of a stolen comb. A stolen comb? Yes, stealing a comb is what the child is wrongly accused of doing, but when he passionately argues that he is innocent, he is not believed. You may ask: where’s the crisis? I repeat: He says he is innocent, he is not believed. This is no less than the entry into language as facticity, language as unreliable conduit. “There ended the serenity of my childish life,” he writes; words are a broken bridge, our hearts cannot be read*.
But the other side of this equation is no less crucial: language as empowerment**, language as means*** of comprehension & agency, language as indispensible tool for growing up****. We will have occasion to see the most “successful” figures in my study, the ones who manage best to make their way into life, whether it be by overcoming adversity or understanding the nature of culture (the culture that contains them), enlist words as one of their chief resources. We will see this writ large, as it were, in the trials & exploits of figures like the picaro Pablos, Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin, & Alice Walker’s Celie.
Further, what would we know about the lives of others if it were not for the written record, the vital transcription of experience into language?***** Our most precious accounts of childhood, of the experience of growing up & making our way, come to us by way of writing. Writing not only ensures the communication of this key phase of life, it is the tool that enables us to give shape & meaning to it, to retrace it, to convert its quicksilver into cadences & form. Writing eludes (as nothing else does) time’s entropy & erasure, so that the depicted childhood of, say, Rousseau or Dickens or Proust still shimmers in its immediacy (& in its mix of terrors & errors) while those men’s bones moulder in the earth. But that is the least of it: the stories of growing up, bequeathed to us by literature, partake of the miraculous plenitude proper to narrative******: they are big with time, awash in culture, so that they yield an echoing script that not only captures the child’s experience but also signals much more: the gathered familial & cultural vectors whose weave inhabits the mind of the child & the foreboding temporal curve to come, as the child leaves childhood & enters the adult scheme. Through the narratives of childhood, the accounts of the voyage from morning to noon, we access something no photo, no single utterance can express: at once an unfolding of human potential & a peculiar map of private & public destiny, interwoven.” ~ Morning, Noon, & Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books – Arnold Weinstein
*Except, possibly, by ourselves, to whatever varying extents. Life is a read, not a write (“That’s just vanity.” ~ No Country for Old Men) Comprehension is fundamental. But, can hearts be overwritten with graffiti, & those vandal & gang-tag scripts “taught” (memorized a la Pavlov’s spurting salivary glands) & regurgitated with each pump? Depends on the substrate – does it codependently interlock? – but obviously, yes.
**Empowerment doesn’t corrupt, & absolute empowerment doesn’t corrupt absolutely, but the already corrupt seek empowerment, & if they can get it, absolute empowerment.
***Isn’t this having the cake he already ate, above? No justice, no peace & no labels, no comprehension? Really? How much thinking & labeling goes on whilst traversing a racetrack “at speed” (relative)? Not so much, because it’s too slow. As for agency, how much of that does sociopath 007 – as signed into imitative written language, & as living model to be imitated – have?
****Later, this author characterizes growing up as selling out; says Balzac initiates the genre of “success” as loss of ideals, & that Dickens amplifies & deepens this arc of a orc further still. Largely just so. But who says “growing down”? That too would offend vanity.
*****Remember what author has just written about the retrospective constructedness of rewriting childhoods.
******Nair takes the hair off, narrative glues it back on. If you think plugs & weaves & comb-overs & toupees look ridiculous & bad…well, those are just some trees in the hairshirt humanimal forest. (Wish I could remember the source for the hilarious scene that had some guy exiting a dumpster behind a waxing salon…pube-plastered.)
You write like a badly designed ‘bot.
Botticelli ain’t for everyone, Ed (& like the Cohen lyric goes, doves’ll be doved – will be bot&tob (sold) – over & over again), but I’ve always loved fat bottomed girls. And redheads. Strong, educated fingers, lushing it out:
Not only spelling and grammar, but speech has also degraded to the point where it is nearly impossible to engage in an intelligent conversation today. Verbal tics and non-words abound in most people’s speech today, adding unnecessary length and meaningless noise to any exchange. “Um”, “uh”, “and duh”, “you know”, “like”, and others predominate in most exchanges today. Those who don’t care about effective communication brush it off, saying “I don’t even hear it”, or “it’s just automatic”. Excusing such poor communication on the basis of ethnicity, economic status, or some other grievance, is disingenuous in the extreme. Without clear, concise, and accurate interpersonal communication, society begins to suffer, and the basis of the modern civilization is at risk. Many will say using proper English for verbal interaction is not necessary, and will call it racist (like everything else). Remember, these are the same sheeple who wear face diapers while driving alone in their cars and while, they are swimming. God help us all.
All this does is create opportunity for those who actually passed English. I was handed an awesome job once purely because I can write without using emojis or L33T speak. The world still needs people who can order their thoughts and bang out papers in English language.
I once read a story about a guy who would read his local paper, edit the awful grammar, send the edits back to the paper, and was in return offered an editor position.