Don’t be surprised to discover that I’ve used this statement in several past columns: It’s a miracle that anyone learns English. I’m instantly reminded of the song Professor Henry Higgins blurts out early in the movie and play, “My Fair Lady.”

The professor, a dialectician and grammarian, sings “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?” as he laments Eliza Doolittle’s use of “aawww” and “gawwn,” a form of Cockney-speak people of that time and place had grown accustomed to.

English is unpredictable. The schwa, for example, that phonetic symbol that looks like an upside-down “e,” and is called a neutral sound, can represent any vowel sound. There are only five vowels in the language (six if you count “y”), but 14 or 15 vowel sounds, depending on which part of the country you live in.

Yes, English is a strange tongue. It’s a language that renders the vowel combination of “ou” a half dozen ways, representing a host of vowels.

My first year of teaching high school writing classes, I discovered that almost all of the students who made noticeable and numerous errors in their compositions appeared to make the same kinds of errors. So, in my naiveté, I set out to compose a tiny manual that codified the 50 or 60 errors students made. So ambitious was my plan that I figured my list of corrections might apply to all English-writing students.

Yes, by isolating the various errors, showing how to correct them and prescribing exercises that would guarantee that students would never again commit those silly booboos; we’d be on our way to perfect writing. After all, how difficult can remediation of half a hundred misuses be? Well, after 33 years of chasing commas and writing the same comments on students’ papers, the errors continue to appear.

As part of the Facebook generation, I don’t have a lot of regard for the finished products of submissions of many in my circle. Why is it so difficult to distinguish between your and you’re? Between to, two and too? between a lot, alot and allot? Or its and it’s? How long have these linguistic butcherings existed?

Over the years I’ve acquired perhaps 40 texts on correct English. Almost without fail, the books contain lists of errant uses and mispronunciations. And though in my naive days, I assumed the list was small, I’ve learned the hideous truth: It’s enormous. Equally amazing is that some texts go back 60 years, with the same errors highlighted.

It’s clear why English teachers don’t have any friends. Would you like it if some nit-picking, college-educated, smarter-than-thou teacher type prevented you from speaking or writing much because of constant interruptions: “It’s mayhem, not mayham, unless you’re referring to a particular piece of porcine protein that’s plentiful before June.

As you may have surmised, I never finished that planned usage manual that I’d hoped would enable everyone to speak and write like Rex Harrison, the protagonist in “My Fair Lady.” The list of verbal speed bumps is simply too large. And besides, some of today’s texting generation might have already created a vast lexicon of abbreviations meant to represent complete thoughts.

Monday, traveling south on Eighth Street, I drove alongside a young man riding his bike on the sidewalk. I noticed that periodically he’d take both hands off the handlebars. Why? Well, he was texting, and a serious texter needs one hand to hold the cell phone and the other to punch in ROFLMFAO, LOL and IMHO.

And that makes one wonder whether the thousands of words that make up the language of Shakespeare and Milton may eventually become obsolete, or be used only as part of a series of abbreviations. If we know that IMHO stands for “in my humble opinion,” do we even care about the meaning of each word being represented here? Can’t today’s generation simply agree on what it means, without taking the trouble to dig deeper?

IMHO, that’s a quick way to dismantle any language. And I don’t LOL as I express that fear.

• • •

Dining out is a great pleasure, even though treating the Trujillo clan can often cost up to 80 bucks.

Inflation is real. In 1954, when the family drove to my sister’s wedding in Las Cruces, the restaurant tab for seven of us, as they say, “tore the heck out of a 20-dollar bill.”
But back to the present, when a full after-church restaurant meal, not including tip, costs as much as a car payment.

Why, then, am I addicted to eating out? It’s great to gather around a table with the confidence that none of us diners needs to clear the table after the meal and load the dishwasher, or wash things by hand.

I recall a meal at Dick’s Restaurant where I ordered a Cobb salad and was asked by the new, rather callow waiter what kind of dressing I’d like. I told him I wanted “French ­— on the side.” Well, that puzzled the waiter, who obviously wondered whether I requested that all the dressing go to one side of the salad rather than being spread evenly.

My oft-repeated complaint is that if I even mention a dressing, the salad sometimes comes back with six quarts of the stuff gooped over the lettuce and tomatoes. Finally, the young man seemed to have caught on. “Oh, I see! You want to pour it on yourself.”

I said, “exactly.” Then my second-born, Diego, said, “Dad, you’d look funny with dressing poured over your head!” At that restaurant, thankfully, salad dressings comes in small plastic pouches, which let diners determine how much and whether the vinaigrette goes on one’s head.

And if women can use mayonnaise to condition their hair, why can’t men pour on as much dressing as they wish?