Our Language

It began with a trip by car to the local fast food burger chain. At first, it appeared as if someone had made the intellectual equivalent of a typo while painting. The sign read, “Drive-Thru.” Really? That was odd, but when we learned that the truncated spelling was intentional, did any of us stand up and declare, "No, you can't do that to our language!"?

Of course not. We are not allowed to call a company foolish. That company provides jobs, it moves the flow of commerce. We do not have to hold them accountable to our basic rules of life. We idly allowed for the manipulation of proper spelling to take place while going about our stuffing of fries and slurping of colas. Let’s not go overboard – this kind of verbiage is not a travesty, though it is bordering on something that is just plain wrong.

Can we not use the extra few letters worth of paint to properly call a fast-food-delivery window what it is, a Drive Through?

Soon, it was apparent this was not a mistake but rather the introduction of an oncoming trend. Child care became Kiddie Korners; the convenience store became a Kwik Stop; the ice cream parlour became an EZ-Freez. Even churches took to the act. A musical was “Wee-Three Kings,” a choir became a “Praize Band.” WHY? What is the point of a z instead of an s in that instance?

Before long, there came a cereal for kids not rabbits that tricked the kids into thinking they would get a kick out of performing trix instead of tricks while eating Trix instead of Kix. Try explaining that one to a three-year old.

It all came tumbling down with the great American chicken sandwich. Good food indeed! But, when a company begins by spelling fillet as “fil-a,” the point of words is doomed. Later, that same Georgia chicken discovered that an illiterate cow was the way to advertise, as if dumb beef is somehow less appealing than the chicken which that cow protested against in the first place. The jokes about illiterate cows abound, but we won't poke fun at a chain's target audience. That would be mean.

However, we could take a shot at the irony by which that same company purports to support and promote education through their toys and kids meal packages while simultaneously misspelling common words and butchering (get it?) grammar for the sake of a simple pun. Have you seen these ads? “Buy More Chikin.” “Eet Moore Chikin Heere.” It might as well read, “We Are as Dumb as You are so Buy Our Chicken.” Then again, that chicken is good!

Then, without warning, along came a vitamin-laced water provider that went and pulled a fast one. Their label is written in all LOWER CASE letters! (Get it? That is an attempt at irony.) The label-writers at a soft drink company are no e.e. cummings, so who are they to write without proper capitalization? Unless someone in that company can provide proof of direct family lineage to the great poet, then they may not and shall not advertise in lower case letters. It is not only bamboozling the American people to think that they are original, but it is also dumbing down those who choose to drink the stuff.

The more we publish or sell or advertise or print material that is incorrectly written and formatted, the more we counter the very meaning of education. It is bad enough that parents do not support education, the least a company could do is try. The point is - the more we tolerate, the more we lose!

While Hooked on Phonics tried their very best to stem the tide that was becoming the unfortunate dismantling of our language, we stood by and thought it cute that a “Masked Marketeer” came up with that idea. We were pirated! Would you let someone steal your luggage? No! Take your CD player? No way. Then why were our words any different? Our language was taken from us on the deep Sea of Ignorance that has become commercialism. And what did we do? We stood aside, handed over that big fancy wheel that drives our ship, and allowed for our language to be pillaged.

How is it that a corporate scheme undermined the very thing that identifies us as a people?

When we no longer police our own language we begin to lose our identity. Language itself represents us. It will become the only testimony that we were ever here in the first place. Buildings will collapse, empires will dissolve, commerce will eventually turn over to the next great theory, and this life as we know it will become a boring chapter in a history book which no one wants to read. Under the section for our times, there will be a heading that reads: “Bizness Was Good: The EZ Years!”

Without clear and concise language we are nothing more than the animals – but a cow would never utter a moo in a tone that tries to convey anything more than its three or five main concerns. We realize that animals communicate through their own rhythms and nuances, but they do not alter it to be clever or to throw a pun around like we throw their dung at some humiliating toss-a-contest.

History will look at us as a confused race - one that is lost between kwik, quick and qwik all because someone wanted to be cute... as if the proper delineation between to, two and too or there, they’re and their aren't enough to confuse kids or people who not speak English as a first language.

Perhaps this is taking things too seriously. After all, language is a living and breathing evolution of history. But what does it say about us if we mistake cash for kash and EZ for easy? It says we are either lazy or stupid, or maybe complacent.

Recently, students wrote a paper in a Pennsylvania school about the famous literary character Rip Van Winkle. The teacher was surprised to receive several essays that identified the sleepy fellow as R.I.P. Van Winkle. Talk about an assumption. Did anyone tell Van Winkle that his century-long sleep was in fact the same sleep of death that Hamlet moaned about?

By letting our language devolve into its own sub-genre where words are only understood by a few, we have begun the extermination of thought. As soon as we do not even know what the hell we are talking about, we devoid communication of its substance. Likewise, we water down the basic meaning of what we are saying. This is without even addressing text message lingo - the very place where language has gone to die.

R U kidn me? Neone noes we git it. IDK. Mabee dae dont. WutEv. C U L8r…

Boy, spell check is going to love this post! Sorry, but the proof is in the typo.