From The Montgomery (Alabam) Advetiser
Vanzetta McPherson: Whose English?
May 13, 2010
For several years now, Amy Gillett has written and published a book and compact disc set titled "Speak English Like An American." It is designed to teach idioms and vernacular phrases that make American English unique and indigenous to the United States. Presumably, its desired outcome fits quite nicely into the national language agenda espoused by politicians like Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo.
Gillett's title is catchy and perhaps well-intentioned, but regrettably, in today's America, too many of its natural-born citizens don't really speak English. Instead, they speak a home-grown, inconsistent version of the Mother Tongue. The idioms of Gillett's focus are not the problem. American speakers and writers today simply ignore the rules of grammar, punctuation, capitalization and syntax. And American listeners -- a declining number of whom know better -- simply let them.
The issue summons us to examine trends in education, technology and politics.
At some distant moment in the past, educators decided that the rudiments of grammar should consume less classroom time. That decision was apparently one of the battles in the successful war on rote memory. Reciting rules, mastering the parts of speech, diagramming sentences and writing extemporaneous compositions became almost extinct. So did the endless elementary school exercises in identifying homonyms, antonyms and synonyms. The saddest death of all was the routine spelling bee -- the ones that were unrelated to national competition and grand prizes.
Young adults who bypassed these exercises now have difficulty completing job applications, writing the essay required for college admission, writing routine memoranda at work and spelling words correctly in any of these undertakings.
Then came the social and artistic movements that may as well have been designed to impose an enduring taint upon our beloved language. Heavy metal and hip-hop artists deliberately altered word meanings, changed spellings (boyz, lite, becuz) and assaulted grammar in the name of "keeping it real." Language was a casualty of the "me generation," a somewhat tacit movement that resurrected Narcissus and made personal considerations the measure of propriety.
To this linguistically toxic pudding was added the otherwise life-enhancing effect of technology. Although we can now send and receive messages instantly and do so almost anywhere, the messages we now send sometimes bear little resemblance to English. E-mails and texts reflect individualized, and therefore inconsistent, shorthand, and they conveniently conceal the sender's inability to write the same message in standard English.
After all of these developments, it is intriguing at best and hypocritical at worst that politicians now demand that recent immigrants speak English and denounce bilingual publications by government and business. First, immigrants might well ask "whose English?"
Depending upon whether they walk the aisles of Wal-Mart, listen to a morning radio talk show, observe a session of the Legislature, watch a typical situation comedy on television, or read any set of online comments to newspaper columns or magazine articles, immigrants trying to learn English will hear and see vastly different versions of a so-called common language and will likely be exposed to every possible breach of its rules. We should not wonder that they become as inept as we are in expressing themselves.
Second, at least the immigrants who learn English become bilingual. Since bilingualism is obviously a value in American education, given the century-old presence of French, German and Spanish in our high school curricula, we should strive to learn another language with as much fervor as we entreat immigrants to learn English. But anti-immigrant politicians are blind to the usefulness of learning Spanish, the language of 40 million other American voters -- a language that will likely be spoken by the majority of Americans in 40 years and the language spoken by the first European settlers in North America (remember Ponce de Leon?).
If we're serious about helping immigrants learn English, we should improve our own English. We hear many proposals for modifying elementary and high school curricula to help students learn more effectively, prepare them better for higher education and make them more marketable as employees upon graduation. Yet few seem to focus on language mastery. It wouldn't hurt to re-examine and improve the pedagogical processes and tools used to help students master the one skill that informs all the others.
If we agree that hours of just pitching, catching, free-throws, lay-ups, tackling and blocking ultimately improves the entire game, can't we agree that hours of practice in subject-verb agreement, spelling and punctuation ultimately improves overall communication?
If not, we may remain more proficient in the games we play for fun and profit than we are in the language we use to connect with each other.
To this linguistically toxic pudding was added the otherwise life-enhancing effect of technology. Although we can now send and receive messages instantly and do so almost anywhere, the messages we now send sometimes bear little resemblance to English. E-mails and texts reflect individualized, and therefore inconsistent, shorthand, and they conveniently conceal the sender's inability to write the same message in standard English.
After all of these developments, it is intriguing at best and hypocritical at worst that politicians now demand that recent immigrants speak English and denounce bilingual publications by government and business. First, immigrants might well ask "whose English?"
Depending upon whether they walk the aisles of Wal-Mart, listen to a morning radio talk show, observe a session of the Legislature, watch a typical situation comedy on television, or read any set of online comments to newspaper columns or magazine articles, immigrants trying to learn English will hear and see vastly different versions of a so-called common language and will likely be exposed to every possible breach of its rules. We should not wonder that they become as inept as we are in expressing themselves.
Second, at least the immigrants who learn English become bilingual. Since bilingualism is obviously a value in American education, given the century-old presence of French, German and Spanish in our high school curricula, we should strive to learn another language with as much fervor as we entreat immigrants to learn English. But anti-immigrant politicians are blind to the usefulness of learning Spanish, the language of 40 million other American voters -- a language that will likely be spoken by the majority of Americans in 40 years and the language spoken by the first European settlers in North America (remember Ponce de Leon?).
If we're serious about helping immigrants learn English, we should improve our own English. We hear many proposals for modifying elementary and high school curricula to help students learn more effectively, prepare them better for higher education and make them more marketable as employees upon graduation. Yet few seem to focus on language mastery. It wouldn't hurt to re-examine and improve the pedagogical processes and tools used to help students master the one skill that informs all the others.
If we agree that hours of just pitching, catching, free-throws, lay-ups, tackling and blocking ultimately improves the entire game, can't we agree that hours of practice in subject-verb agreement, spelling and punctuation ultimately improves overall communication?
If not, we may remain more proficient in the games we play for fun and profit than we are in the language we use to connect with each other.
Vanzetta Penn McPherson is a retired U.S. magistrate judge for the Middle District of Alabama.
Vanzetta McPherson: Whose English?
May 13, 2010
For several years now, Amy Gillett has written and published a book and compact disc set titled "Speak English Like An American." It is designed to teach idioms and vernacular phrases that make American English unique and indigenous to the United States. Presumably, its desired outcome fits quite nicely into the national language agenda espoused by politicians like Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo.
Gillett's title is catchy and perhaps well-intentioned, but regrettably, in today's America, too many of its natural-born citizens don't really speak English. Instead, they speak a home-grown, inconsistent version of the Mother Tongue. The idioms of Gillett's focus are not the problem. American speakers and writers today simply ignore the rules of grammar, punctuation, capitalization and syntax. And American listeners -- a declining number of whom know better -- simply let them.
The issue summons us to examine trends in education, technology and politics.
At some distant moment in the past, educators decided that the rudiments of grammar should consume less classroom time. That decision was apparently one of the battles in the successful war on rote memory. Reciting rules, mastering the parts of speech, diagramming sentences and writing extemporaneous compositions became almost extinct. So did the endless elementary school exercises in identifying homonyms, antonyms and synonyms. The saddest death of all was the routine spelling bee -- the ones that were unrelated to national competition and grand prizes.
Young adults who bypassed these exercises now have difficulty completing job applications, writing the essay required for college admission, writing routine memoranda at work and spelling words correctly in any of these undertakings.
Then came the social and artistic movements that may as well have been designed to impose an enduring taint upon our beloved language. Heavy metal and hip-hop artists deliberately altered word meanings, changed spellings (boyz, lite, becuz) and assaulted grammar in the name of "keeping it real." Language was a casualty of the "me generation," a somewhat tacit movement that resurrected Narcissus and made personal considerations the measure of propriety.
To this linguistically toxic pudding was added the otherwise life-enhancing effect of technology. Although we can now send and receive messages instantly and do so almost anywhere, the messages we now send sometimes bear little resemblance to English. E-mails and texts reflect individualized, and therefore inconsistent, shorthand, and they conveniently conceal the sender's inability to write the same message in standard English.
After all of these developments, it is intriguing at best and hypocritical at worst that politicians now demand that recent immigrants speak English and denounce bilingual publications by government and business. First, immigrants might well ask "whose English?"
Depending upon whether they walk the aisles of Wal-Mart, listen to a morning radio talk show, observe a session of the Legislature, watch a typical situation comedy on television, or read any set of online comments to newspaper columns or magazine articles, immigrants trying to learn English will hear and see vastly different versions of a so-called common language and will likely be exposed to every possible breach of its rules. We should not wonder that they become as inept as we are in expressing themselves.
Second, at least the immigrants who learn English become bilingual. Since bilingualism is obviously a value in American education, given the century-old presence of French, German and Spanish in our high school curricula, we should strive to learn another language with as much fervor as we entreat immigrants to learn English. But anti-immigrant politicians are blind to the usefulness of learning Spanish, the language of 40 million other American voters -- a language that will likely be spoken by the majority of Americans in 40 years and the language spoken by the first European settlers in North America (remember Ponce de Leon?).
If we're serious about helping immigrants learn English, we should improve our own English. We hear many proposals for modifying elementary and high school curricula to help students learn more effectively, prepare them better for higher education and make them more marketable as employees upon graduation. Yet few seem to focus on language mastery. It wouldn't hurt to re-examine and improve the pedagogical processes and tools used to help students master the one skill that informs all the others.
If we agree that hours of just pitching, catching, free-throws, lay-ups, tackling and blocking ultimately improves the entire game, can't we agree that hours of practice in subject-verb agreement, spelling and punctuation ultimately improves overall communication?
If not, we may remain more proficient in the games we play for fun and profit than we are in the language we use to connect with each other.
To this linguistically toxic pudding was added the otherwise life-enhancing effect of technology. Although we can now send and receive messages instantly and do so almost anywhere, the messages we now send sometimes bear little resemblance to English. E-mails and texts reflect individualized, and therefore inconsistent, shorthand, and they conveniently conceal the sender's inability to write the same message in standard English.
After all of these developments, it is intriguing at best and hypocritical at worst that politicians now demand that recent immigrants speak English and denounce bilingual publications by government and business. First, immigrants might well ask "whose English?"
Depending upon whether they walk the aisles of Wal-Mart, listen to a morning radio talk show, observe a session of the Legislature, watch a typical situation comedy on television, or read any set of online comments to newspaper columns or magazine articles, immigrants trying to learn English will hear and see vastly different versions of a so-called common language and will likely be exposed to every possible breach of its rules. We should not wonder that they become as inept as we are in expressing themselves.
Second, at least the immigrants who learn English become bilingual. Since bilingualism is obviously a value in American education, given the century-old presence of French, German and Spanish in our high school curricula, we should strive to learn another language with as much fervor as we entreat immigrants to learn English. But anti-immigrant politicians are blind to the usefulness of learning Spanish, the language of 40 million other American voters -- a language that will likely be spoken by the majority of Americans in 40 years and the language spoken by the first European settlers in North America (remember Ponce de Leon?).
If we're serious about helping immigrants learn English, we should improve our own English. We hear many proposals for modifying elementary and high school curricula to help students learn more effectively, prepare them better for higher education and make them more marketable as employees upon graduation. Yet few seem to focus on language mastery. It wouldn't hurt to re-examine and improve the pedagogical processes and tools used to help students master the one skill that informs all the others.
If we agree that hours of just pitching, catching, free-throws, lay-ups, tackling and blocking ultimately improves the entire game, can't we agree that hours of practice in subject-verb agreement, spelling and punctuation ultimately improves overall communication?
If not, we may remain more proficient in the games we play for fun and profit than we are in the language we use to connect with each other.
Vanzetta Penn McPherson is a retired U.S. magistrate judge for the Middle District of Alabama.
