I am technically too young to be curmudgeon but I am about to become one. Ok, I said this would be a political and current events oriented blog but I have to wonder; what happened to manners and good grammar? Was there some decision I missed that made both obsolete?
While the grammar thing bothers me more, to be honest, it is clear that customer service is more important and that has gone to hell, in the US anyway. If I call my credit card or some other company to whom I owe money and want to pay them the person who answers the phone is not doing me a favor by taking my call. In fact anytime I call a company for a service that they offer the customer service representative is not doing me a favor by taking my call. They are doing their job. As someone who has done customer service and technical support for a living I understand how much it sucks to deal with angry customers or constituents, it sometimes sucks to deal with them when they are in a decent mood but you have to be nice to them. They are the reason your job exists and they don’t get paid to be nice and helpful, the customer service representative does so the responsibility to be nice is theirs. I hate it when I call a company and get treated poorly, worse when it is someone who represents me in my government.
And that leads me to my second issue; bad grammar. Does no one care about using their language properly? And you may think you have not done it or seen/heard it but you have. The saying is “I couldn’t care less” NOT “I could care less.” If you could care less then you care at least a little. And plural nouns do not need apostrophes, contractions do. If you want to know what that means, read the previous problem – “couldn’t” is a contraction between could and not and when contracted becomes couldn’t. Also it’s (a.k.a. it is) is the only time that works. I understand people think possessives require apostrophes as in “Sally’s car,” they often overuse them, especially when using “it’s,” as in “Did you see Sally’s car? It’s door has a scratch.” Even if you are referring to a possessive that involves an ‘it,’ such as the example above, you do not need the apostrophe. I mention this because it is one of my biggest pet peeves. My writing is far from perfect but these pop up all the time. I was at the doctor’s appointment and saw a note on my way out telling me that “prescription’s can be picked up at …” WTF? I am supposed to trust my health with someone who cannot speak their native tongue? And the doctor was from New York. It bothers me so much that when I was in New Mexico I could not go to a bar because their special was five dollar pitchers of “margarita’s.”
One reason it bothers me so much is that these signs are not the only place such errors are found. Whenever I get letters from my government, any agency, the letters are fraught with spelling and grammatical errors. I make mistakes, too but my letters, emails and blog posts are not on official letterhead. Does no one proofread these letters? Does no one care about grammar and spelling anymore? Did they ever? There are institutions in France and England that work to maintain the integrity of the respective languages and we do not have that here but maybe we should. This may be part of why we sounds like idiots when we go overseas or to any foreign non-English speaking countries because the locals speak our language better than we do.
I spent a summer living in an apartment with a woman and her teenage daughter. The daughter had left a paper she had written, for English class I think because it was about a book she had read and it was fiction not a science book, and I read it. Should I have? If you think “No, that was private.” I agree and still feel badly for invading her privacy but it wasn’t her journal so I feel a little better but I should not have done it. Having said that, I read the report and it depressed me more than I can say. I could make out what she meant in the paper but it was just a long run-on sentence that was neither a real sentence nor a paragraph. It was missing verbs and most words were misspelled. She was 17 years old and about to graduate high school. It is one thing to speak one way that differs from how you write or to use slang and/or poor grammar for stylistic effect but it is another to not know how to write. Many professionals, such as journalists have stopped using verbs. They use gerunds,(if you are not sure what I mean, you are not dumb lots of people do not know what they are.) A gerund is formed when you take a verb and turn it into a noun by adding ‘ing’ to it. Most major news outlets do it all the time and it annoys the crap out of me because the news industry usually tries to be as succinct as possible but this is not the way to do it, in fact it makes their sentences longer; It bothers me because it sets an example and when people read the paper they assume it is written correctly and then they mimic it. I know what you are thinking, there are much bigger problems to worry about in the world such as war and famine and natural disasters. It bothers me because we are not teaching kids the skills they will need to succeed in any business and good writers are hard to find.
Additionally, more and more I read letters and articles where people confuse a large vocabulary with intelligence. There are words listed in the New York Times’ Style Book that call certain words ‘more pretentious versions” of other words and recommend using the smaller word. Granted, that is a stylistic difference of opinion not grammatical/spelling error but I have also noticed people either use larger words or longer phrases than needed. They also do something worse; if they do not know a larger word for one they know, they make it up. I got and email that used this technique to the point where I had to call to find out what they meant, the message made no sense at all.
In my opinion, this is a sign of the downfall of our civilization. No, I am not kidding. Anyone who knows me knows I am not kidding. There are countries where violence against women has been a huge problem. One way they dealt with it was to crack down on ‘cat calling’ and other offensive behaviour. It may seem odd but the rational behind it is that when you create an environment where one kind of behaviour is allowed it leads to worse behaviour and crime. I think the same can be said about language. Words are powerful. What words and how we choose to use them says a lot about us as people and as a society.
Our words do more than express a thought or two but they define us and we should care about that.
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