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The Lost City called ‘Proper English’


I believe in the English language. The use of grammar, punctuation, and yes, even capital letters. The silhouettes of three dotted ellipses for dramatic pauses thrill me to no bound. The purring of verbs like ‘speak’, or ‘verbalize’ sends a shudder deep into my spine. Forget a heartfelt text with all the short hand messages of true love, no; give me one complex sentence with a subject, verb, and a subordinate conjunction. I don’t want a love poem, I just want a complete thought expressed in an independent and dependent clause separated by a coordinating conjunction, and maybe even a coma, is it so much to ask?!

What happened to the language we used to hold so dear? How did the dear three lettered words ‘are’ and ‘you’ loose our respect so much to be shortened to the one letter addresses of ‘r’ and ‘u’? Are we so lazy that we cannot take the time to write out the surrounding vowels and consonants? Or am I just behind the times?

No. I will not fall along the bandwagon of illiteracy. I am a proud writer and speaker of the English language. I have short and sweet moments of bliss with the beguiling coma, secret love affairs at the end of an independent clause and begging of another with the illusive semi-colon, and I am a proud practitioner of the powerful parenthesis. So you can see my shock when I hear myself spouting out ‘omg’s and ‘lol’s when in casual conversation. There, in the English I Honors class room I call my home, I thought to myself, have I lost my grip on my sanity which is literacy? Has my vocabulary really declivity that I can only use three lettered acronyms? Have I just become a part of the crowd that like uses a questioning tone where there should be none? Because, I’m not educated, so don’t think I am, I’m just trying to go with the flow, because I don’t want to be trout swimming up the wrong side of the stream, and if literacy is out, I want to be in so I can’t sound confident or eloquent in what I’m saying, so I must keep rambling to seem smart when I really don’t want to and it’s just like so hard when the language you hold so close is falling and no one gets it…. you know?!

I have not lost hope. I have faith in my fellow scholars, and humans in general that our language will not fall into ruins of empty thoughts and unpunctuated sentences. It will not crumble into the barren waste land where names and the pronoun I will no longer be capitalized. No, the legacy of our fluently speaking and writing forefathers will live on, on the pages of empty volumes of poetry and writing. I believe in the expression on ones emotions in the fluid flows of words and that the art of doing this shall never die. So, in the words of the great poet Taylor Mali, “I challenge you: To speak with conviction. To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks the determination with which you believe it.”

I believe in you.