Teenager’s Needed 4 Grammer Lessons
January 1, 2009 • written by Frannie Sprouls
A world without a language is like a book without words. There is no way to get the message across.
In a school where “like”, “whatever”, and “OMG” rule the halls, it’s easy to question what in the world has happened. Incorrect word order and words with unnecessary apostrophes appear on posters, in letters, and in essays.
Could it be due to laziness? Or that we just don’t care? Or that maybe it hasn’t been taught enough?
We could just be lazy. It’s true, so don’t even try to deny it. Those who text all of the time use short phrases such as “LOL” and “OMG”.
We abbreviate when we write our papers for English. Why shouldn’t we? Why waste all of that energy writing out the whole word?
Our conversations are filled with slang words like “homie” and “’sup”. Apparently, we are too lazy to pronounce the whole word.
Carly Mace, a junior, says, “I think it’s important for college interviews but with our friends it’s different.”
Teens and adults alike have lost job opportunities because of slang usage in an interview. Maybe we don’t even know how to speak properly.
“The problem is the focus is on the literature and we’ve let the grammar slide,” says Mr. Estenson, Speech Communications and Drama teacher at Park High.
He’s noticed that seniors seem to have lost the fundamentals of English. The curriculums in the schools don’t include even the most basic grammar lessons.
The truth is that we judge people just by how they speak. How many times have you made fun of that girl that says “like” way too many times for your liking? Or when someone makes an obvious spelling mistake?
All of us are guilty of just that. Do not even try to deny it. It could be you who is saying “like” all the time.
Newspapers and magazines spotlight errors like these. The Pioneer Press has a area in the Opinion section titled “Opps!” displaying grammatical errors people have seen.
Over the years, American citizens have made many jokes about President Bush. Do you remember the response that Miss South Carolina gave last year? It was a jumbled mess of “like”, “um”, and something about education in South Africa.
While it’s true that our English is sliding, maybe, just maybe, there is some hope.
“I see language as a living thing,” says Frau Tol, German teacher here at Park High. “That is how language evolves. Maybe we’re a part of a language evolution.”
We could be the ones creating the new form of the English language. That’s a scary thought.
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A culture’s language is directly related to its reality. As the language grows the its picture of reality grows.
Did you ever notice that learning something new, Economics for example, is really only developing an understanding for new words and phrases, and the concepts that lie behind them? When one develops an understanding of the concepts that lie behind economic terms and phrases one is then better able to formulate and share ideas about Economics.
Language is a tremendously empowering tool. But this tool, like others, is subject to degradation, because of that, we must perform maintenance on a regular basis. We must not be lazy. We must avoid using abbreviations, we must always work on speaking and writing well, and we must consistently expand our vocabulary. In doing so, we will keep the greatest tool that we have in tip-top shape. If we are lazy and let our language degrade, our ability to formulate and share ideas will lessen, and our picture of reality will shrink. Our language will act as a tool of enslavement. A scary, and thankfully fictional, but good, portrayal of language as a tool for enslavement is George Orwell’s “1984″.
Frannie, we are the creators of language.
Ironically, the dialect we use here in the twin cities has been rated as being the second most grammatically correct form of Spoken English in the world (Johannesburg, South Africa is the first). Due to the universality of the internet and television in recent years, people have begun to depend on electronic sources in addition to locale exposure to learn their language. Unfortunately, with one of the most popular television stations being MTV and similar stations, our generation has begun to develop a more degenerate form of the English language based around incomplete words, slurred pronunciation and basing most of our sentences around curses, sexual remarks, and aggressive statements. Another development in our modern language is the use of cell phones and texting. Due to the way cell phone companies have historically charged their customers, things had to be stated in a quick, shortened fashion. When text messaging first became popular, you had to get your point across in less than fifty characters. [Between these brackets is more than fifty characters] This led to shortening words into as simple of a manner as possible. Later on, as some people never really caught on to what the abbreviations meant, they were spoken phonetically, making them a part of everyday speech.
Frankly I don’t care if slang is used when spoken (I use slang myself), but when I see an essay with the words “Romeo iz da shizz pimp daddy fer Juliet” (no, I’m not kidding. that was actually in there) in an AP English class during peer editing, I lose my faith in humanity.