Sweet baby Jesus! I'd swear some people never learned English. Proper English. Grammar and all that fun shit you learn in elementary school. The fucking basics. I don't ask for much. Never once have I expected anyone to speak using the same eloquent prose that we were forced to read in high school. Nobody is asking you to compose your thoughts in iambic pentameter. Just, please, for the love of all things good and holy, speak correctly. Don't murder your mother tongue. It's embarrassing...for me AND you.I have to say that I hail from the same country and you are making ME look like a moron. Unacceptable.
Not everyone majored in English, like I did. Let me assure you, I didn't think you did. A fairly useless degree at best, it has afforded me the ability to write understandably and with a certain degree of clarity that many cannot. However, knowing that "brung" isn't a word doesn't take an advanced degree and an abundance of student loans. Verb conjugation isn't reserved solely for Spanish class, or whatever foreign language you chose to take in school. Using the right form of any word, verb, noun, pronoun, is mandatory. You want to be understood, right? Most people will be able to translate some of what you are saying because we have children and have heard the bastardization of language as only the young can. In general, you sound like an idiot, on your best day. Realizing that you frustrate the shit out of most people who have the unfortunate privilege of being forced to listen to you, should clue you in that something has to be done. When I hear that someone had "tooken" the bus, I feel stabby, oh so stabby. What the fuck on Earth is tooken? Do you even own a dictionary? Not every kid was a screaming nerd like I was and read the dictionary for fun, of this I am painfully aware. But, we aren't here to discuss my quirks and childhood issues. We can, just not now.
I am not picking on those for whom English is a second language. My great-grandparents did not claim English as their primary language, I do understand the struggle and can forgive those who emigrated from their homeland to come here. English is one of the hardest languages to learn. I can accept that. However, when it is the ONLY language you've ever heard and used your entire life, I expect a fair amount fluency. What I don't want to hear spewing out of your cakehole is that your son is "more better" at sports than his cousin. You are clearly *more stupider* than I can believe any human being could be. Did you really feel that comparative needed a little boost? A little something, something? Damn.
Another interesting habit of those who torture and maim English is when they are in the middle of the aforementioned language brutality, they suddenly slow down and speak very succinctly, like they want you to hear just how smart they believe themselves to be. Not to be confused with the speaking to foreigners in customer service method of speaking loudly and slowly. This is a case of a burst of imagined intelligence coupled with a need to be validated for that outstanding burst. Let me assure you, what you do when you try to speak in those lovely rounded tones, is look even more retarded. All you are doing is drawing attention to the fact that you cannot speak your native language with any more proficiency than the average toddler.
Some phrases are regionally specific and have nothing to do with incorrect speech patterns. There's no difference between soda, pop, and coke. Just like a sneaker and tennis shoe differ only in spelling. This is not what rubs my ass the wrong way at all. As a matter of fact, I happen to love the differences in the way people speak from East to West and North to South. I'm the first to pick up on new names for things as well as regional accents. Love 'em all! What chafes my hide, what really gets under my skin like a friggin parasite is people who seriously don't know how to speak.
At a CPR/First Aid certification renewal class, my coworkers and I chose to sit as far back as possible, like the ill-behaved children we are, so we could mock the presenter. At least I admitted it! Anyway, she was your typical bleached-blonde, white trash woman with the long-assed fake nails and teased hair. Queen of the trailer park. To her credit, she was fast and didn't drag the class out to it's full, grueling, repetitive 8 hours. However, and you knew this was coming, her grasp of the English language was embarrassingly slight. As my friends and I eyeballed each other while she was speaking, snickering here and there because we are immature at times, she gave the usual spiel along with some homespun anecdotes using her own life as examples. Fanfuckingtastic. Love that shit. But, when she told us the story of how her son's appendix "had bursted," I almost peed my pants. Seriously. It was touch and go for a while, trying to stifle my laughter, wipe the tears from eyes, and attempting to avoid looking at any of my friends, knowing it would have caused an eruption of uncontrolled hysteria. I suppose sometimes, the stupidity of others can be quite entertaining. I know I get a kick out of it.
While some phrases are regionally specific and have nothing to do with bad grammar, there are others that are just plain wrong. The one I want to bring to your attention is the hanging preposition. Nowhere else have I heard so much abuse of this language offense than right here in the Bay Area. One specific example sticks in my mind like crap on the bottom of my shoe at the CA State Fair. No way to clean it completely and the stink stays with you for what seems like an eternity. Somehow, some way, leaving the word AT hanging off the end of a sentence has become a normal speech pattern. I must have blinked. I've heard teachers do it! What the fuck?!?! Let me know where you're AT, is not and will never be grammatically correct. If you want me to take you seriously, just don't do it. Am I the only one who had to diagram sentences in 7th and 8th grade? A prepositional phrase is just that, it has more words. It doesn't stand alone. Don't leave it there like a redheaded step-child.
In case you were wondering, SUPPOSABLY and IRREGARDLESS aren't words, either. No matter how many dumb shit newscasters you hear use them tonight on your giant, flat-screen TV, they still don't exist. That is, if you can stop laughing at their flowery pronunciations of Spanish words while continuing the newscast in their well-trained non-accents to actually hear them say much of anything else. I don't ask for much from the American public. Is requesting that you speak the language of the country you live in correctly too difficult? Have I asked for a pint of blood and your first born? Are you incapable of proper speech? Well, then, know this, I will laugh at you, out loud and with great enthusiasm. I may even encourage others to join me while pointing at you. Maybe I'm being mean, but you sound like a fucking doofus, what do you expect? Are you friggin kidding me right now???
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