There comes a point in each young person’s life, however wonderful he or she may be accustomed to thinking of themselves as, when they look at themselves and think, ‘you’re a bit of a dick’.
Looking at a war crime commemoration plaque in a Cambodian prison , I went right ahead and corrected the grammar on the English plaque for the benefit of my likewise literate companions. It was then that I decided that I am, in fact, a total dick. Not only for the sheer callousness of what I had done, but because I am often hideously grammatically inaccurate myself, and not even in an ironic way.
If I was better at grammar perhaps, I wouldn’t daily be called up on the fact that it should be were. If I cared more about it, it wouldn’t annoy the hell out of me every time I am corrected, maybe. Which makes me an even worse person. Note my cavalier use of semi-clauses and field of unnecessary commas. Pay attention to the fact that I have yet to use a single exclamation mark because I am on a one woman crusade to eradicate the use of them unless entirely and totally called for. Maybe you, too, take a certain pride in your anal retentiveness over punctuation and grammar. Maybe you, also, shout out with misplaced pride, ‘I GIVE A FUCK ABOUT AN OXFORD COMMA! I really do!’
Those exclamation marks were warranted, unlike my snobbish attitude to grammatical accuracy. It is pedants like myself, filled with a sense of purpose endowed by a three year long essay course, who ruin the development and variation of the English language. Fact. The greatest of poets win accolades for their inventive restructuring of language to reinvent meanings. The void and hope created by a well placed bit of enjambment is not lost on me, friend, oh no. I’m only really cool with it because it’s all high-brow and stuff. Again, what a prick.
A great big blog LOL for many is the pure joy of ‘Chinglish’, where signs or menus are translated literally from the Chinese characters into ‘exploding general chicken’ or ‘chicken mushroom rape’, and the like.
What most Anglophones don’t consider though, is that the English does not exist for their benefit. Just as I’m madly impressed by ‘Canard au confit’ on a menu, the English translations signal class and status to customers, who couldn’t care very much less if their chicken had any ranking in the army, nor how it was killed.
Agreement, word order, personal pronouns: these are fairly arbitrary to anyone who hasn’t been schooled to think that the English language must be upheld as a sign of the strength of Britain and our wonderful education system.
So for my resolution on a new term, I say: screw the grammar police! Ima leave yo’ ranks! I ain’t yo’ footsoulja no more! I’m havin fun wit yo’ gramma! Not your grandmother, just the strict rules and regulation by which you govern if I’m speaking proper English or what. Out go the semi-colons of old! See my positive gush of avoidable exclamation marks!
With my new, liberated sense of abandon, I invite you, dear reader, to cavort with me in the jungle of my favourite sentence of all time, with fresh delight. ‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo’. It’s a real, accurate sentence, but it feels dirty and wrong! It’s full on grammar porn: Verb, noun, and adjective are all the same word, but mostly, it’s all sorts of fun to be saying. Suck on that, conventionally constructed sentences! I’m pretty much a massive word master.
In one of my classes last year, a friend of mine told our teacher that she hadn’t written an essay we were assigned because the very exercise of essay writing limited creativity and bounded thought, and thus the true originality behind the words were necessarily constrained and thus undermined. Surprisingly enough, she sort of got away with it.
That’s my excuse for this article. I could have descend into a pretentious stream of consciousness, or just given up and written only in infinitives. But my hardwired essay writing training is begging me to reign in, punctuate, and make all of my verbs agree. This attempt to chill out on the grammatical dickishness has invariably returned to a platform on which I can flaunt just how much I think I know about grammar. Like I said, I pretty much think I’m a word master. As long as I don’t mess with the prescribed path.
Think about that next time you tell me the use of language in my essay is just ‘generally good’, teaching assistant bastard.
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