Namaste and welcome friends, family, and fellow knowledge seekers to another posting for the Quiet Mouse Strikes Back. Today I wanted to briefly write about how bad American English has become. First, however, I want to put it in perspective as many other nations, especially China and other Asian countries are learning two, three, or even four languages by the time they are in college. We, as Americans get all pissed off about the rising number of Hispanics in our country, yet we are still far behind the rest of the world as we cannot even speak our own primary language very well.
I used to not be such a grammar Nazi. Still I try not to focus on the semantics when I know the meaning of what someone is trying to say. It just irritates me nearly every time I go onto social media, be it Facebook or Twitter and people are spelling even the simplest of words WRONG!!! I know my writing style isn't perfect. I like to highlight and capitalize words for emphasis in the middle of my sentences sometimes. I know that this is improper grammar, but I make an exception from the normal because I think my readers might want to know how I feel, thus the reason for reading my blogs, yes?
So back to the subject at hand. I hate it when I read an article or posting on social media and I see someone spell their or there as "thur"; nothing as "nuthin", as well as and becoming just "n". Who doesn't love the auto-correct of "ducking" either. I'm convinced that not only do many people not know how to spell correctly, but they rely too much on dictionaries from their phones and auto-correct that leads to confusion and misspelling.
Folks, we live in the United States where there is a jumbled hodgepodge of cultures mixed together, where we mix together words from other languages into a big soup. What's sad, however, is that this is really our ONLY primary language in the U.S.A., our scrambled up American English, and we're not really speaking it very well. Add in the Hispanic culture and black Ebonics, and now our language is really muddled up. On top of that the media likes to make up new words all the time too, like bootylicious and badonkadonk.
Usually I have ideas on how to fix problems when I write a blog, but this time I've really been tied up on this and have no real ideas, but to just go back to basics and focus on the English roots of our conglomerated language.
I used to not be such a grammar Nazi. Still I try not to focus on the semantics when I know the meaning of what someone is trying to say. It just irritates me nearly every time I go onto social media, be it Facebook or Twitter and people are spelling even the simplest of words WRONG!!! I know my writing style isn't perfect. I like to highlight and capitalize words for emphasis in the middle of my sentences sometimes. I know that this is improper grammar, but I make an exception from the normal because I think my readers might want to know how I feel, thus the reason for reading my blogs, yes?
So back to the subject at hand. I hate it when I read an article or posting on social media and I see someone spell their or there as "thur"; nothing as "nuthin", as well as and becoming just "n". Who doesn't love the auto-correct of "ducking" either. I'm convinced that not only do many people not know how to spell correctly, but they rely too much on dictionaries from their phones and auto-correct that leads to confusion and misspelling.
Folks, we live in the United States where there is a jumbled hodgepodge of cultures mixed together, where we mix together words from other languages into a big soup. What's sad, however, is that this is really our ONLY primary language in the U.S.A., our scrambled up American English, and we're not really speaking it very well. Add in the Hispanic culture and black Ebonics, and now our language is really muddled up. On top of that the media likes to make up new words all the time too, like bootylicious and badonkadonk.
Usually I have ideas on how to fix problems when I write a blog, but this time I've really been tied up on this and have no real ideas, but to just go back to basics and focus on the English roots of our conglomerated language.
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