Several years ago, I made a trade: a bicycle I hardly used for a dachshund. Heidi (what else does one name a weenie dog?) had acquired bad manners, gulping her food, piddling on the carpet when chided and scratching and chewing on wooden items.<\/p>\n
My friend, the trader, who lived next door, bought an expensive, kennel-trained Great Dane to teach Heidi some manners. The trainer promised my friend, Bob, that in no time, the bigger dog would set such a good example that Heidi would soon follow suit by eating only with a napkin around her neck, using knife and fork, wearing a pad, chewing each morsel 17 times and eschewing wooden furniture.<\/p>\n
You can imagine where that experiment went. Soon both dogs were behaving like Heidi. They growled for their food, wolfed it down, dog-in-the-manger style, and in short, behaved badly. People often imitate the animals.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
I like to think I have three fairly intelligent sons, capable of good English and impervious to the pitfalls that befall the language, words like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153like\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stuff.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Not only do I like to believe they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re articulate, I believe they are.<\/p>\n
But take them out of their natural habitat, mix them with other relatives, most of whom are intelligent, college-educated young people, and the rules of grammar, usage and syntax go on vacation.<\/p>\n
Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an example: One son wants to know what his Denver cousin is up to these days. Rather than asking, simply, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What do you do there?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the question becomes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Like whaddya do there, and stuff?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Rather than answering, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I work in a laboratory,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m like a software engineer, like checking items, and stuff like that.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Can I bear to continue listening? The language of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton reduced to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stuff like that.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
In fairness, I like to think my relatives are merely \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hanging loose\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with language, uttering the first word that comes to mind, even if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cliche-ridden. Notice how it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so much more difficult to be profound when we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in a hurry? When someone else utters something intelligent, something that puts me in my place, if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just then walking out the door, whatever my planned comeback is, I end up saying something unbright \u00e2\u20ac\u201d like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153whatever.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Little has changed over the years since I hung up my piece of chalk and my tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Back in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, I wrestled with notions of what would constitute good grammar. I never urged my high school speech students to parade the language with polysyllabic profundity laced with platitudinous ponderosity.<\/p>\n
No siree, Bob! Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s use the vernacular, with the exception of a handful of forbidden words which I must not hear as we compete in the Valley High Speech Tournament. The words are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153like,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stuff,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I mean,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s see\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ya know.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d One of my more promising speech students, took it upon herself to rehearse the class on what words to avoid in the upcoming tournament.<\/p>\n
Accordingly, Jackie said, with pep-rally frenzy, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s get these words out of our system: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dclike,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcstuff,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI mean,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dclet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s see\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcya know.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Dutifully, the class repeated the words that make their teacher, Mr. Trujillo, cry.<\/p>\n
This overdose, I believed, would become a cure. At the tournament, soon both dogs were behaving like Heidi, or in the speech context, Jackie had simply implanted those words with the result that they became the default words for the otherwise lofty topics they spoke on.<\/p>\n
I looked in on our leader, Jackie, expecting to hear great things when it was her turn. But whether it was my presence, or the stage-fright inherent in that kind of competition, Jackie recited the forbidden words, almost all in one sentence.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ya know, like, I mean the topic of the, like, electoral college, I mean, is quite complex, and stuff.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Oh, what have we done to the language?<\/p>\n
Ya know, use of these forbidden words is somehow related to but not the same as the vowel-less words one pecks in to a cell phone, another topic about which I often rant. Remember that communication through texting has already led to two things: the elimination of the semicolon and the creation of the endless run-on sentence.<\/p>\n
I used to imagine that if we used these forbidden words, in a controlled setting, until we became moderately ill, the words would disappear.<\/p>\n
Like, I now believe extra exposure to these words conditions the speaker to use them as fillers, whenever a more precise word is lacking, and stuff like that.<\/p>\n
Well, Bob and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s venture into animal training failed, as did my attempts to dictate how high school students in Cuba, N.M., ought to speak.<\/p>\n
That was more than 40 years ago. Has anything changed?<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
A boss was giving instructions to a new front-office hire. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There are two words that you must never use when speaking to our customers. The first one is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153swell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122; the other one is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lousy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Got it,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the new employee answered. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So what are the words you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want me to use?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Did you notice a strange use of the first-person pronoun as a possessive, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bob and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00e2\u20ac\u009d instead of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bob\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s and my venture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? Though my homeroom teacher at Immaculate Conception School, Sister Mary Kranken Grammatik, would never have approved of such usage, I, like, think it sounds better my way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Several years ago, I made a trade: a bicycle I hardly used for a dachshund. Heidi (what else does one name a weenie dog?) had acquired bad manners, gulping her food, piddling on the carpet when chided and scratching and chewing on wooden items. My friend, the trader, who lived next door, bought an expensive, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":856,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions\/856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}