She’d Like a Few Words With Me?

Taking a look over at the “Arts & Life” section of the Winnipeg Free Press, an article catches my eye and the urge to scream is growing like vomit in the back of my throat. Apparently, she’d like a few words with me. Not me, specifically, but to readers who prefer to use the English language to its full extent and properly. I am going to borrow the opening paragraphs that the columnist, Alison Mayes, starts off with.

“If you’re a grammar grump who gets huffy about misplaced apostrophes and commas, nouns used as verbs, or Canadians who pronounce lieutenant ‘lootenant’ rather than ‘leftenant, a new book by a Winnipeg linguist is aimed at you.
It just might convince you to get off your high horse and show more tolerance for all those ‘lazy’ folks who are ‘destroying’ your precious English.”

She must be French. Please forgive me for wanting to use the verbal communication that was taught to us from birth correctly! To use it to its full extent in what I would call ‘proper’ English does sound a little different to all of the dimwits who can barely conjugate a sentence without throwing in a thousand mistakes, whether it be intentional or not. How the author of this book “Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language” writes that her goal is to “debunk the idea of a correct grammar”. Even when written in full sentence of what I just read, it’s still seems like a grammar fragmentation to me (excluding the fact that I just wrote 7 words from an already incomplete sentence… 4 words if you’re an English fanatic such as myself [the words ‘the’, ‘of’ and ‘a’ are not considered actual words]). So what she is saying is that she promotes people who become mentally and verbally incompetent and probably uses abbreviated words in speech such as “O.M.G.” instead of actually saying the words. It is not myself who is being ignorant towards the morons who cannot comprehend a single proper sentence, it is the author (and the columnist) who are not attempting to help people who have not been correctly (albeit politely) educated in the common English language. And just to show my anal-retentiveness, I’m going to include the basics of English into this letter.

Let’s start with the basics, shall we?

I’ll start with a noun. That’s correct; you use one in every sentence that you use. It is, in fact, quite hard to form a sentence without one. A noun is a person, place or thing.

Next on the list are pronouns. These are used in place of nouns. Such examples would be interrogative, demonstrative, personal or relative, etc. (the others would be looked up in a dictionary or on the internet, but as proof that I am not a complete moron, I am not using any outside help.).

And then we have verbs. This is an action or state of being. This means that you will be using action words, such as ‘jump’, ‘hop’, etc.

Adjectives are next on my list. These are used as describing words. This is a simple enough explanation for that.

Adverbs are one of my favorites! These are used to modify (or change) verbs or adjectives, as they will show when, where, why and how (and no, you’re not clever by adding “and sometimes ‘y’”).

Now, there are other parts of speech that I shall not include in this letter, simply because most of you will probably not be able to comprehend the explanations. Not that you are a fool such as this Winnipeg ‘linguist’, but just the fact that this is not an English class and I am not your teacher. Those other parts of speech though, for those of you who are actually reading this and taking it in for further knowledge in creating a mind of higher competency than those around you, are (without definition) prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. For those of you who paid any attention during high school (yes, this IS the one class that I passed every time while correcting the teacher and making him furious), you would have learned these. The first listed, you would have learned in grade school, hopefully within the first years of beginning.

Yes, maybe I am creating a “cloak for exclusionary elitism”, but I would rather be a part of the academically influential rather than the lower class of slothful idiocy. I can’t find anything wrong with myself being a better person at the English language than most of you would have suspected (I’ll be the first to admit, I’ll get lazy on occasion. If you know me well, you’ll also know that I correct myself because I cannot stand being impervious; even to my own psyche). But to go as far as to call me a ‘snob’ goes a little too far. What did the author write; “To not defend our English based on the fact that it is inherently better”? Then I shall ‘get lazy’ with my English and add this sentence as my closing line:

Screw you, I’m brilliant.