Say What?

Is American English an endangered species? I guess that depends on whom you ask. The folks at the Merriam-Webster Company would like you to believe American English is alive and thriving. Every year they add definitions for utterings that heretofore had no official place in the American English language. Apparently, all it takes is a popular usage – or misusage – of words to be added to their dictionary. Do you have any idea what f-bomb, copernicium, gastropub, or sexting mean? Don’t ask me! I’ve never used the words, but you can look them up; they’re in the dictionary.

To the distress of some Germans, the popularity of English words has even made inroads to Duden, the German dictionary. I learned to speak German as a child from my stepfather. When I read German newspapers today, I am often confused. I’m not sure if I am reading an American news article with German words or a German news article with English words. In truth, though, both are the same language. They share a common Anglo-Saxon root.

The language I hear from our young ones today is nothing akin to the English I was taught in school. Okay, if I’m strolling through Harlem, Detroit or Watts and hear ebonics, I’m not surprised – I have no idea what is being said, but I suppose it’s a dialect used in those locations. But when young kids begin using that slang outside of the inner-city environment, I begin to wonder if American English is dying or evolving – maybe devolving – into another language. The vernacular is even popping up more frequently in children’s television programs and even on mainstream programs. Today’s music is infested with words unintelligible to most English speakers.

Then there is the Tweet. Ah yes, that 140 character jumble of ambiguous and confusing abbreviations, insinuations, and emoticons. Come on folks, does LOL mean laughing out loud, lots of luck, left of left, lack of libido, or lost our language? OMG! When I see something that looks like it might be a sentence ended with a mixture of strange punctuations, I am now aware they are trying to convey an emotion in what is called an emoticon. I just turn my head sideways, squint, and try to imagine that odd jumble as being some sort of face. It rarely works, but the sender thought he or she was being clever.

A lot of the Tweet jargon evolved from Instant Messaging, where the senders were just too lazy to use proper sentence structure. All right, I’ll grant you that English grammar is not altogether an easy proposition. For every rule there exists any number of exceptions. Capitalization, punctuation, subjects, verbs, objects, prepositions, split infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition … it’s all very confusing. But if you were paying attention in grade school, this is what you were taught. We all had twelve years to learn to write and speak correctly, didn’t we?

One thing that irritates me to no end is the email from a person known to be literate that contains all lower case characters, no punctuation, and obscure abbreviations. It makes me want to shout to the sender that all of the necessary keys are on every keyboard to make at least a stab at writing something coherent. The network provider doesn’t charge more for Capitals or correctly placed punctuation. Give me a break! Write something I can read!

English is the (unfortunately) unofficial language of this country. Sure there are a multitude of non-English speakers in the US. I am bi-lingual, and every once in a while a German word or phrase will slip out without me catching it. Usually the person I’m talking to at the time has no clue to what I just said, and I need to correct it. No problem. I apologize and say it in English.

The hard fact is that to be understood, you need to use American English in this country. Don’t expect others to learn to speak your language. There are just too many different languages for one person to understand. Long ago our forefathers chose to use English as a common form of communication in this land – not ebonics, Spanglish, Chinglish, or Janglish, just plain old English. I believe the lingua Franca that is taught in our schools is still English. It is not dead yet, so please use the correct form. You will appear much smarter.