this is a grammar rant; this is not a grammar rant -

• published: 10 Feb 2014
• views: 8

The funny thing about grammar sticklers, the funny thing about grammar sticklers- is that they know enough to know an oxford comma when they see one, and not to use it; they know enough to know when to say 'lie down' or 'lay down'; and how to spell 'a lot' and 'all right' and that irregardless, and anyways are not real words and yet, what they forget is the fact that language is always changing, including within our lifetimes! There are people with the gall to applaud William Shakespeare for inventing tremendous swathes of the English language - epileptic alligator lovemaking deafening laughable bandit birthplace - and yet cannot stomach 'conversate', 'supposably' or 'yolo' - yolo! It's practically a zen koan! It's the essence of existentialism in only two syllables! There are people who cannot agree if the plural of octopus is 'octopi' or 'octopodes', who frown upon texting as if it were language's death by a thousand clicks - but if algebra brought letters into mathematics, then texting brings numbers and symbols back to speech: after all, what is the square root of a hashtag? What is an acronym if not the babel tower restacked with phonetic meaning? And the emoticon! The much maligned emoticon- a real attempt to bring tone and feeling into written communication, practically pantomime on the page! This is not the death of culture, this a polyglot of blissymbolics and ikea instructions spoken in Romance, Germanic, Semitic, Sound and Java! The textophony is nigh! The blogosphere is a mass attempt at speaking the collective subconscious aloud, breaking the surface like Samuel Johnson and Allen GInsberg staring at each other from across time and space! T.S. Elliot can go suck on an Indo-European dialectal conjugation flowchart for all I care! The frontline of communication is not Webster's, it's Urban Dictionary! Your spellchecker is a fascist! But your tip of the tongue and tooth tumbling out testimony to articulation and truth is a happy-accident samizdat mosaic! We need a bescherelle for our century, to translate postmodern English into the international patois of keystrokes, music notes, and hand gestures because I care a helluva lot more about understanding you, than I do about goddamned phonics! I am tired of portraits painted of cluckingly smug grammarians, so try this one for an infographic: if a picture is worth a thousand words, than a word must be a thousand times as precise, a burning pixel of memory and noise. Alors, vive les mots; mein geliebter Wortschatz; linguagem doce; viva vox! - Long live the raucous glory of speech for as long as there is anything worth talking about! Like the biosphere, the soundscape is ours to hold for the commonwealth of all- -irregardless of what you may have been told.