License To Love

Miss Suzy's Glossary

If you find any words in my posts that you believe should belong in the glossary, please email me or leave me a comment.  This is an expandable list, with, it seems, a theme.  Who knew?

birth an alien, verb: to have a bowel movement

doofus, noun: a foolish, stupid, or otherwise incompetent person

doofi, noun: plural of doofus

grow a trail, verb: to have a bowel movement

knick-knack, verb:  to spank, or otherwise aggressively admonish

jabberwockies, noun: the news media

lay wolf bait, verb: to have a bowel movement

mutter-cuss, verb: to say in complaint, under your breath, sounds and words that convey displeasure

paddywhack, verb: see "knick knack"

take the Browns to the Super Bowl, verb: to have a bowel movement

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.

Is Spell Check the Mark of the Beast?

For a language that took over 1500 years to develop, you’d think English would finally be content with itself and would consider resting easy for a while. You’d think it would be happy staying home, tending the fire, puttering around in the garden for once. It wouldn’t have to be modest – after all, it is the primary language of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom. It is also commonly used in countries with a colonial past, such as South Africa and India, and is taught as a primary foreign language of many other countries. It could still stay full of itself with its strange spellings of strange sounding words a body has to be “in the know” to understand. I reckon the red wren was a wretched recreant!  However, it would be good for it to rest for a spell.  Just be for a while, dude. 

But no.  It has to be fluid, constantly adapting to large (and gross!) changes in the use of English in the media, which translates nearly instantly to use of English in the under 18 set. Cheeky English.

 The fact is: English is ill, and I don’t mean “ill” in the same way my teenager does, which is the “ill” that is actually not ill, but good. There is a contagious case of English language sickness that seems to be breaking out everywhere we look.  I believe, as the traditionalist that I am, even though I just used the word "dude" in an essay, that it may be incurable.   

 Things that have gone out of the grammatical window in the US:   

Spelling.  Spelling is gone like a freight train.  Gone like a freight train filled with boxes of Dolch sight word flash cards on a track that dead-ends at the top of a rocky cliff.  I believe that spelling is the Spencerian script of the modern world. No one does it anymore, even though it once was the visual equivalent of a bird singing his heart out on a spring morning.  Who needs to understand spelling when we have Spell Check installed everywhere that a piece of software can physically be installed, including on cell phones?

I believe that Spell Check will one day be the actual mark of the beast -- it will be installed via microchip into our babies, allowing for an "intuitive" understanding of spelling and word use which will involve a red underlining of our children's thoughts then, in word form, flash across their little retinas and flip over to declare itself correct before they even dare to speak or write a word.

This will eventually evolve English into language that doesn't actually require real words, and then....English will be DEAD.

Oh, wait.  We're already there.  We have texting.

You don't believe me when I say we no longer need words to communicate?  ^RUP^ : AAMOF, your BFF, AKA IRL as “Jenny”  who is ROFL. It’s 2G2BT! *

And what happened to grammar as a result of these changes I never asked for?  Grammar has been thrown to the dogs like a cat carcass. We live in a country filled with reality shows starring people who may not be in the deepest end of the gene pool, and as such, should not be the example of intellect for our children, and our children’s teachers, to model.  Yet, they are.

My pet peeve: 

Me: How are you? 

Anyone under the age of 35: I’m good. 

I don’t care how “good” you are, you are not good enough at grammar to keep William Malone Baskerville and your own grandmother from rolling over in their graves every time they hear that phrase uttered, and you are not good enough with your basic speech to have earned my respect.

In fact,  I may see evidence of how good you are in your daily actions – you are probably quite a good person, but what I want to know when I am asking that question is: how "well" you are, not how "good" you are.   Do people no longer know this?  Is this unable to be tracked in Spell Check?

 There used to be a time where if you answered “I’m good,” instead of “ I’m well,” your mother would slam your head down in your morning bowl of Cheerios until you said "I'm well, thank you," with milk dripping out of your sinuses, or your teacher would smack you with a ruler until you wept, and your parents would be grateful. Has proper English really died?   

 The truth is, there are people fighting the good fight to keep English grammar consistent and correct. The stodgy old English teacher, the one who looks like the Crypt Keeper - - she’s a soldier. Grandmas and grandpas all over the English-speaking world are disgusted with the speech of their grandchildren, but try to model correct grammar in the letters they write to their children's children, letters that they no longer expect will even receive replies. Yet they fight the good fight.

Many writers, teachers, and most publishers still take pride in grammatical excellence, but not all of them. I find errors in newspapers, in television commercials,  letters from school teachers and principals, and even in discourse between professional  political commentators. I've even heard slang on news shows. Wizzle da hizzle?!
These people are supposed to be setting examples.

Things you can do to keep the English language fire alive: 

Talk to your children in proper English. Remediate your skills, if necessary. You can do this online, for free! Remind your children that they will need it to get a job later on in life that will actually allow them to feed and clothe their own children, presumably the same children to whom you will one day be writing many unanswered, yet grammatically correct letters.

Point out grammatical errors in the media. Give your children spelling and grammar activities. Train them to use superior grammar skills all the time, reminding them that it will set them apart from the masses and help them develop a superior intellect. Note: this may only work for snobby, elitist children -- it worked for mine.

Make your children read real literature.  Read great books aloud to them instead of watching Survivor or Punk'd. Make them write, then correct what they write. Encourage them to enter essay contests. Find ways to keep it fun. Let's let Mr. Baskerville rest in peace,and do your part to help keep English alive.

I'm Miss Suzy and I approve this message.

 

* Read up, please. As a matter of fact, your  best friend forever, otherwise known in real life as “Jenny,” is rolling on the floor laughing. It’s too good to be true!”