When I was a senior in high school, I caused a minor uproar with an essay I turned in to one of my writing classes decrying the use of proper grammar. It was intended as something of a personal joke between the teacher and myself, and the essay itself contained impeccable grammar. The truth is, the rules of grammar are very important for proper communication. I truly believe that. However, there are times that grammar gets in the way of creative expression. The rules cannot, however, be properly or effectively broken without having first been mastered. Which was kind of my point. Artistically speaking.
The teacher I wrote this for (Mr. R.) then took it to the teachers’ lounge and shared it with my journalism teacher (Ms P.) who took it quite seriously and literally and waved it like a flag of triumph in a battle for the hearts and minds of a rebellious generation. I’m still a little surprised that no one ended up bruised or bloody from the fallout I heard, though I suspect over time the disparity between the old guard (Mr. R.) and the new (Ms P.) lessened exponentially. At least for a week, I was the cause célèbre (or perhaps my essay was) around the four or five people who paid any attention to the ruckus. I might have a copy of that essay tucked away in a box somewhere with other raw materials for some future rat’s nest. But that isn’t really the point here.
I am made to recall this otherwise insignificant moment from my youth by an article summary in the New York Times email edition that I read this morning. It reads as such:
EDITORIAL
A Terrible Transportation Bill
House Republicans want to starve mass transit while doing even more for Big Oil. The House bill needs revised. If it passes, the Senate must stop it.
What is this lazy trend of omitting the verb “to be” that I have been seeing so much of over recent years? If that hasn’t stuck out like a sore thumb for you when you read that summary, then you are not reading the text. “The House bill needs revised” is not a proper sentence. It would be easy to pass off as a mere typo, but this sort of writing has become prevalent over the past decade as shorthand has worked its way into our shared dialogue. This must stop.
When I was working with a friend of mine from the East Coast some years ago, he used to say things like “this needs fixed” all the time. I would respond with something like “that doesn’t mean anything” or “you forgot your verb.” My gentle sarcasm didn’t help because he would merely argue that he was speaking the way people talked and that everyone understood what he meant. I thought he was deliberately lazy and somewhat isolated in his insistence on sloppy grammar, or that maybe it was an “East Coast Thing.” (You know, we Elitist West Coasters are known for our strict adherence to proper speech. Right, Moon Unit?) To my chagrin, I was wrong.
This tendency to forgo the use of verbs is all around us and in the age of Twitter has grown profoundly worse. Communication as a whole suffers. It has been easy to see the decline of communication skills since the introduction of email. Forget that the early adopters of electronic communication were largely techno geeks who might not have been grammar all-stars, it is really the speed of communication that contributed most heavily to its decline. The fact that a message could wiz around the world in seconds made it all too easy to hit send without proofreading, much less contemplating the content for an additional moment. Instant messaging compounded the problem, because people would hit the send button regardless of the typos, which were readily accepted because, you know, we are not all professional typists.
Jump ahead a few years and pass the period where emoticons are readily adopted, right into the age of cell phone texting. Now users are literally forced to use shortcuts because it is so time consuming to send proper texts, lol. I mean, really, rolling on the floor laughing out loud takes a LOT of key presses to squeeze out, as necessary as it is to convey that level of mirth. Smiley face. But how does this transfer to our real lives? For one, people are quick to misinterpret what you mean. It is bad enough that our messages are lazy in the way that they are sent, but they are equally lazy in the way they are received. Subtleties are lost. And when the subtleties are no longer there, the deeper meaning of a message is also no longer there. Context is removed, which is a shame because context is the root of all meaning. Without context there can be no message.
And this is where grammar helps us. Grammar is merely a set of building blocks for the communication structure shared by a collective group that has agreed to utilize a certain language. Without a solid foundation, any structure fails. This is what is happening RIGHT NOW, in tiny ways that appear frivolous or insignificant to most people if they are even acknowledged at all. But they are not frivolous. There may be a shift happening toward creating a revised structure as happens from time to time, but the short term ramification is that we have a large cross-section of the population that is causing a communication chasm. And as the recent Republican debates have highlighted, this is no small issue. I hope that it is avoidable, but I still fear a future where the President of the United States tries communicating policy in 140 characters or less.