The Grammar and Spelling Police are on duty again this week. That oft-mentioned electronic message board on Mills keeps committing errors. Here’s how:
An Albuquerque TV station, reporting on the much-understated “hazing” incident involving members of the Robertson High School football team, showed in the background the animated sign which carried the message, among other things, “The drama is begining.”
It’s not the drama that’s beginning (note the three n’s), it’s the typos. Remember, some of these repeated messages remain for days.
But it was refreshing to come across a fairly sophisticated use of the language a month ago when I arrived too late to cash in on a special at the local Alco store. I’d heard of a half-price offer for customers who got to the store between certain hours. So I asked one of the clerks what I needed to do to walk out with the super special purchase. Her answer: “You had to have been here an hour ago.”
That was impressive. I missed the boat but not the quote. In only nine words, the clerk made it clear that I was late. That was obvious. And she also expressed, as my English teacher would say, “the use of the perfect infinitive (to have been) to express action before another action.” “Perfect infinitives,” “predicates” and “tenses” are terms I failed to learn while at Immaculate Conception School, and the totality of my recollection of grammar terms is simply that the past was perfect and the present is tense.
When someone asks the kind of question I did, we generally expect a far simpler response, often accompanied by some kind of accusation, as in, “You should have been here earlier,” or “you were supposed to come earlier.”
Contrast the perfect Alco locution with one that appeared in yesterday’s Newsweek magazine, in an article titled “An Unlikely Gambler,” about Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of Washington, D.C.’s public schools.
She tells of a conversation with her Korean-born mother, about a tumultuous meeting the superintendent had had. Rhee says, “My mother is like, ‘Are you OK?’” Rhee later, she adds, “I was, like, ‘Yeah.’”
When did “I’m like” take the place of “I said”? We like realize Michelle Rhee is like only a superintendent of one of like America’s like largest school districts, but is it like asking too much for her to be, like, clear?
Rhee’s casual statements bolster the belief of language scholar John McWhorter, who writes of the ascendancy of casual spoken language over the more precise, “correct” written language.
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It’s taking a while to get used to Sirius Satellite Radio, a new feature in my car that provides more than 100 absolutely clear, commercial-free stations, ranging from sports to talk to classical music to hip-hop to traffic and weather. There’s even an all-Elvis station.
It was like a kid-in-the-candy-store situation as I read the literature and tried to program a dozen favorites. What surprised me was the information of the salesman, Bob Abreu, who explained I had a choice (among many others) of New Country, Prime Country, Outlaw Country and Bluegrass.
Until this week, I assumed Country was, well, Country. What lyrical permutations must a singer employ to turn a simple country tune into the outlaw version? The only outlaw tune I recall is “El Paso,” sung by Marty Robbins, who kills a “dashing and daring” young cowboy who was sharing a drink with “wicked Felina,” the girl that he loves.
The satellite radio also includes all manner of “rock” stations: early classic rock, later classic rock, deeper classic rock, classic hard rock and pure hard rock. And unless it’s a typo, my brochure appears to offer even “grunge” rock, probably to balance the more sanitized rock.
All this makes me long for the olden days when popular music pretty much was limited to rock-and-roll and waltzes.
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Earlier this week, J.P. Baca of KFUN read a press release on his “Over the Back Fence” program concerning plans to expel several Robertson High School students who allegedly took part in violent hazing a few days earlier. Baca added an impromptu commentary about the radio station’s decision to avoid coverage of the issue.
Baca stressed that when new Superintendent Rick Romero “feels comfortable,” he’ll be able to provide the facts, presumably through another press release or an interview.
I beg to differ.
That’s not how news media operate. For the past two weeks, the townspeople have talked and thought about little else. All around the state people are aware of the violent hazing and are lusting for the facts. People are angry. People are scared. But mostly, people are horrified that this possibly happened in our community.
KFUN could do some reporting on its own rather than relying on press releases, which by their very nature allow the source to cherry-pick the details.
We have no doubt of the honorable intentions of the East Las Vegas Schools administration and believe everyone wants the truth to surface, but the decision merely to sit back and let the press releases roll just doesn’t cut it.
It relegates the radio station to an arm of the government and does very little to inform an anxious listening audience.