Nicotine Poisoning Gave Me Good Grammar Skills

I am convinced that if any one of us was dropped via time machine into decent American society in, say, 1901, we would be at such a grammatical loss that would be unable to sit through a dinner without insulting someone,  communicate with people well enough to get directions, or obtain a job in any other field besides shephardry.

Language use has changed so much in a hundred short years that we now, as a matter of course, use words that were considered terribly vulgar not that long ago. If you think about it, we don't need to travel back a hundred years  -- gross vulgarization of our coarsening language is readily noticable  to anyone who is old enough to remember television before the onset of cable. Take the time machine back to the summer of 1975 to my grandmother's gold living room (it wasn't a color scheme, it was a global nicotine staining) and observe me getting paddywhacked for saying the phrase "me and her" at the table.

"Did anyone stay up with you and cousin Alice Theresa?" "No. It was just me and her."  Down went little Suzy's face in her potato salad.

I went to visit my grandparents every summer.  I loved the predictability of my visits. We did the same things every weekend of every summer. I went on Saturday mornings to my grandfather's job. He was a bookkeeper for a huge pants factory and on Saturday, when the factory was closed, he let me run up and down the dusty, light-filtered rows of enormous rolls of fabric, dark, dangling machines, and piles of pants in various stages of cut-out.  After a half day of work, where he actually worked and I did investigative fingerprinting with the typewriter ribbon ink I had eviscerated from the machine, we would go to the sawdust-strewn butcher's for meat, and the butcher would give me a slice of bologna, which I would nibble over the hills of Scranton, while we made various other stops to the distributor's for our weekly case of Yuengling longnecks, the bakery for some good rye bread, and home to my grandmother's lunch.  There, I would sit at her table and get my grammar corrected so rigorously that if it weren't for the formica and particle board kitchenette with vinyl covered vinyl chairs, nubby vinyl place mats, melamine dishes, and enough cigarette smoke to cause anyone who walked into the house to think he had entered a gas chamber, I would have thought I was at a finishing school.

They corrected my speech, guided my thought processes, and made me say things over. And they highest level of formal study either of them attended was the eighth grade. When I got home from their house at the end of the summer, whatever of my possessions didn't ignite and smoke themselves from being so nicotine impregnated had to be burned anyway because they were toxic, but my grammar was reinforced.

If my grandfather came back to life for fifteen minutes and turned on the television to see his favorite program, instead of Hogan's Hero's he would see, perhaps, Punk'd.  Instead of a televised Yankees game, he would see American Gladiators, or perhaps, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, or even Jackass.  He wasn't an intellectual man but I believe he would be so disgusted at the degradation of our speech and behavior that his stogie would fall out of his unhinged jaw and he would light my grandmother's gold living room on fire and die all over again.

Grammar, in 1975, even among the uneducated working class was better than 75 percent of all people with bachelor's degrees in 2008.  This leaves me with an apparrently sustainable sadness that will only  go away when public schools are privatized and they start teaching Latin in middle school.

Let's get to the tidbits:

Did you know that the word date when used for appointment or engagement was even two generations ago, vulgar? Well-spoken people were to avoid saying," I've got a date for tomorrrow," as it was seen as coarse.  Now everyone has a date.  Play dates, lunch dates, hot dates.

The word destroyed as used back in the day, deserves a closer look.  As we know, destroyed means that which has ceased to exist, been knocked to pieces or put to an end.  The well-spoken were urged to avoid the phrases totally destroyed as tautological.

Forgetting for a moment that about 5% of modern English users know what "tautological" means, try to imagine anyone who who doesn't have to worry about microwaves messing with their pacemaker saying the word "destroyed" without using "totally" in front of it. It just doesn't happen. The city can't be "destroyed in the earthquake," it has to be "totally destroyed,"as if "totally" conveys the emotional difficulty of dealing with the destruction. As if "destroyed" by itself isn't bad enough.  Ask four out of five weather reporters on national television.

I also hope the entire English speaking world will linguistically embrace the difference between definite and definitive.

These words have distinct meanings.  That which is definite has fixed or marked limits in signification, is bounded with precision; hence determinate; certain; precise.   Definitive describes positive, conclusive final.   A definitive decision admits no change; a defininte meaning is one so precisely defined that it could not be misunderstood.  Speaking of a "definite end" is ignorant and You Who Did It should no longer be on television, but you are probably  out drinking  mojitos with your good looking flunky friends and are not likely attracted to a blog on English usage.

And while I am at it, I believe the continued success of English speaking Western Civilization hinges on our ability to to use the word momentarily correctly.  Pilots and telephone message recording ladies everywhere, heed:

Momentarily -- what it's not:

It is not a fancy way to say "in a moment." 

With hope, you are not "landing the plane momentarily," for if you are, no one will be able to get off of it, and let's pray, major corporations everywhere, that someone will not be with your clients "momentarily" for your customer service will be so poor that the entire United States, even the Republicans, will be on the phone to India or China for goods and services.  Oh, wait we already are.

Rather, say "I thought momentarily of bringing him home to meet my parents, but then I realized he was a cad."

Casual speech.  Western Civilization.  You choose.

Comments

[Jim Kochenburger]

Yikes x 2! Don't read my blog...you'll go nuts. I am no grammarian (is that the right word??) Good stuff. I wish I did grammar good. :( Seriously, this was a fun read. And if you'd like a few chuckles on the parenting front, check out: http://www.parentconsensus.com/blog/

[Black Belt Mama]

Yikes. I start teaching a composition class at a local college in just a few short weeks. I know it's going to be rough.

[Bee]

I hate to even think of what your grandparents would have done to me. ;o)
I went to vote for you at Humor-Blogs but it doesn't look like you've entered your feed.
Let me know when you do so I make vote for this post.

[kellyds]

Fascinating. I love words.