“Hey, hey, anybody listening? Hey, hey, anybody there? Hey, hey, anybody listening? Anybody care?”

That song, which we often sing in Sunday school, means more to me in light of recollections of my acquisition of the English language, when I was a child.

One of the most stifling memories I have about childhood — wrought largely by the influence of siblings and schoolmates — deals with the pronouncement, “Don’t get excited.”

Some admonished me not to “go ape,” and others even added another word to enhance the ape-ness motif.

Thinking about how people express themselves in speech and writing, I wondered about the multitudes who simply ask, “What’s the big deal?” or “So it’s mispelled, but you can still read it, can’t you?”

That’s exactly the point. I keep wondering whether those in my life who have said, “Don’t get excited!” are right. After all, it’s mere language. With a modest sense of language and an appreciation for how it conveys meaning, I used to wonder why I’d get stares and glares in fifth grade at Immaculate Conception School. 

Once I asked Sister Mary Kranken Zimmer, “If the past tense of ‘drive’ is ‘drove,’ why isn’t ‘arrove’ the past tense of ‘arrive’?”

So she remound (find, found / remind, remound) me of a pile of erasers that I should volunteer to pound out after school. She’d been blound to my protestations that I’d asked an innocent question.

Many people have said I make too big a deal of language, and that I should ignore, among other things, the East Las Vegas Schools message board that advertises an exciting match in “boys scooer” (not to be confused with “soccer” as in “soccer mom,” as in Sara Palin, sort of).

We must also ignore the traffic sign on the 200 block of Grand, where the road narrows, that reads, “No parking begin.”

To what language does that sign apply? We all realize that in certain contexts in German, one has to wait until the very end of the sentence to learn the meaning. We must wait for the verb, even if it doesn’t appear until the middle of Act I of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”

Almost 40 years ago I pored over a set of English compositions for the first time. Back then, we teachers tried to find ways to get our students to distinguish between “infer” and “imply.” We agonized over the repetition of the same errors, as in the there/their/they’re syndrome, or the who’s/whose problems. And we anguished over our failure to teach students that “a lot” is two words, and “alright” is not all right, but “already” is.

My guess is that there are less (or is it “fewer”?) than 100 abuses of the language and that if we spent enough time correcting them, our students’ children would eventually help their schools make Adequate Yearly Progress, part of the asinine No Child Left Behind act.

In the classroom for four decades, I wondered whether all the errors that upset me in the past may have been corrected and a set of new ones introduced.

I spoke to Robyn Rose, an extremely enthusiastic graduate assistant who has taught a number of English, grammar and composition courses at Highlands.

And what has changed for Robyn?

Apparently not much. She said her students still struggle with the usual linguistic suspects such as “who’s” and “whose,” as well  as “it’s” and “its.” One difference, Robyn notes, is the influence cell phone text messaging has had on academic writing.

“Students misspell a lot of words in academic writing,” she said, adding that they omit most vowels when they send cell messages to one another, and those omissions show up in students’ hand-written or typed assignments.

And Robyn pointed out that she has better luck when she requires that students apply grammar rules rather than merely recite them. I mentioned a former colleague who would spend the first eight weeks of class pounding out every conceivable grammar rule, such as, “The object of the preposition is always in the objective case.” Whatever that means.

Then, usually in the ninth week, she’d turn the students loose to write their term papers. And she’d wonder why her students failed to become instant Hemingways.

Have we been imparting information in the same way it was presented to us?

Do we need to know the difference between a gerund and a participle in order to write well? What’s wrong with simply allowing students to write without first having memorized correlative conjunctions and adverb clauses?

If people can write correctly, it shouldn’t matter what their grammar skills are. And as for admonitions from friends and relatives when I’d appear to “go ape” over language solecisms, I don’t intend to change.

I care about language, and it is a big deal.

But here, to borrow an idea fr om the local traffic sign designers, I must say, “No more writing begin.”