ROPES' CORNER

Like many people who work with words, I've always wished I could paint or draw. My brother received all the artistic talent in our family and, sadly, never used it. Oh, I've taken a stab at it a few times. I even tried a few pencil sketches to illustrate some of my poems. My dear friend Jackie Atkinson (click here to see her wonderful site) insisted that I post a couple here for the world to see. I went through my collection and scanned a couple of the least offensive ones. Take a look, and I'm sure you'll see why I choose to write.

My lack of skill with anything resembling a drawing tool isn't the point of this rant. I happen to love the English language. Sure, it's a killer if it's not your native tongue. But its complexity and irregularities are part of its charm. No other language is as colorful, or as flexible. We can describe things in ways that others can't. And if you're stuck for just the right word or phrase, English lends itself very nicely to a little creativity.

I once read a story that contained a scene with a man standing alone by a railroad track. In the story, a high-speed passenger train passed by at that moment. In the writer's words, the train "went dopplering by." What a phrase! The author created a word that fit the scene perfectly; the reader can almost feel the ground shake as that train rumbles down the track. And who could ever forget Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky: "His vorpal blade went snicker-snack." Again, those aren't even real words; but they certainly conjure a clear image in your mind.

So what, you may ask, is my point in all this? It's very simple. Like any rational person, I get upset when someone tortures anyone or anything I love. As I mentioned, I love the English language; and I'm getting very tired of seeing it tormented, folded, spindled and mutilated. Sometimes I feel that I'm living in a country of functional illiterates.

I'm not normally a very picky person; I'm pretty casual and laid back about most things. But I'll admit that I can be pretty anal when it comes to lousy spelling and grammar. Is it no longer required that students pass English to graduate from high school? Are the teachers unaware that their charges can't speak or write properly? I don't expect everyone to be a Carroll or a Hemingway, but surely we can do a better job of educating our children than we're doing now.

Here's a classic example. In grammar school, it's pounded into our heads that any time two or more people are doing something together the action is described beginning with the words "He and I ate," or "John and I fell." Fine. The two people (the subjects) are doing something jointly (the predicate), so both nouns are subjective. Well, we now have an entire generation who believe that any time the action involves more than one person one of them has to be "I." Magazine and newspaper articles, movies and television, casual conversations, the Internet - you see and hear it everywhere. Sports reporter on ESPN: "We're proud that (someone) trusted us enough to grant this interview to Roy and I." Aaaaarrrrggghhhhh! And he actually emphasizes the last couple of words, to demonstrate how sure of himself he is! I guess if he were doing it alone, the sentence would have been: "I'm proud that (someone) trusted me enough to grant this interview to I."

Web pages are more than a hobby for me. I am currently the designer and webmaster for a number of other sites. Naturally, I spend a good deal of time on the Internet. And nowhere is it more evident that command of language is a lost cause. Examples abound, but I've selected one in particular to show you. Why did I pick this one? Because the person who wrote this bills himself as a "Professional Web Site Designer!" This graphic occupies a prominent place on his home page:

A web site created with a "theam?" I don't mean to be cruel, but I honestly hope he doesn't attract a lot of clients with that pitch. If he does, it means that they're just as ignorant as he is.

Well, I'm sure you get my drift by now. There's no need to punish this dead horse too much. We're so intent on raising our children to be engineers and scientists that we're neglecting the basics. By the time they're eight years old their vocabulary is rich with techno-babble, but thirty years later they won't be able to compose a simple business letter. If that's our educators' idea of teaching our children, I have two words for them: "byte me."

"The government has published several reports that the U.S. is 'beating illiteracy.' However, anyone that has had the misfortune of speaking with these latest generations (That would be "The MTV Generation" and the younger "Beavis and Butthead Generation") knows that we have not, in fact, beaten illiteracy... All we did was lower our standards.

"Personally, I see this cultural degradation every day. My coworkers have no idea what I'm actually saying most of the time. It isn't even like I'm always trying to talk over their heads, I just have a broader vocabulary. Average, every day high school students stare at me in awe. Why? Because I can form a complete thought on occasion!

"I've learned to cope with this malady, though. When communicating with someone my own age I try to speak slowly and with as few syllables as possible.

"I'm certainly no angel when it comes to grammar [As previously evidenced]. I once told my fifth grade English teacher that I was a writer. I could put a sentence together, but I couldn't dissect it! I went so far as to tell him that it was against my religion!

"Simply put, I love to write. It may not be something that I do frequently or well, but I love the fact that I can use the English language like some malleable instrument. It is a tool that can be pounded into a completely new form with each application. There is a certain wonder in harvesting words to express the universe as it applies to me, the precision of a phrase, like a scalpel, which can allow a reader within my head from a safe distance and not lose its intent.