Queens English

“The Queen’s scheduled visit to the Lord Mayor of Birmingham…” Wait, let’s rewrite that sentence. “The Queens scheduled visit to the Lord Mayor of Birmingham…” That’s better. At least in Birmingham, England that is.

The city council recently voted to remove all apostrophes from city signs saying that the use of correct punctuation is “confusing and old-fashioned.” Councillor Martin Mullaney declared, “Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed. More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.”

Yes, correct grammar can be confusing. Especially in the modern era where grammar and correct punctuation is no longer taught in schools. There are two main reasons for this neglect: the movement that produced the “fuzzy math” concept which developed out of an excessive fear of hurting a child’s self-esteem; and the multiculturalism that now pervades our nation.

The shift of focus from expounding knowledge to bolstering students’ self-esteems removed objective standards from our education systems. What happened in mathematics with the “fuzzy math,” happened to English with the end of instruction of grammar and punctuation in elementary grades. The National Education Association and leftists in Departments of Education across the nation taught the current generation of teachers to not tell students that there is a right or wrong way to speak, do math, or write. They taught that a student’s self-esteem was a better indicator of future success than their ability to correctly conjugate verbs or multiply. The results of this change in instruction were disastrous and are continuing to wreak havoc in our education system.

Parallel to the development of the primacy of self-esteem in the goals of the education establishment was the development of “linguistic equality” as an extension of multiculturalism. The first installment of the Language Columnist at the DTH is a perfect example. Miss Steindel makes the argument that affirmative action must be maintained to aid students who speak the dialect African-American English (Ebonics) or Southern-American English (people who say “y’all”).

The insanity of this is breathtaking. It’s no longer a matter of ignoring defects in students’ grammar, but we must reward them for their mistakes. By promoting grammatical errors in our education system, we will commit lingual suicide. The asininity of the idea that we should worry more about a student’s self-esteem than his ability to proficiently speak English should be self-evident.

To thwart the decadence of our beloved language, we must stop this nonsense. High school diplomas should not be needed to understand the meaning and nature of an apostrophe. Verbs should be correctly conjugated by second-graders and phrases like “He be good” or “I done did them dishes” shouldn’t be heard on a college campus. As English fares, so fares the nation. And English ain’t faring so well…