NEW CASTLE —
Language as an art form is the most stifled and restricted form of expression known to mankind.
It is ruled by the iron hand of snobbery and forced into a box of conformity that would leave any truly creative mind baffled and perplexed by the antiquated set of awful rules that have been thrust upon it. Our fashion, music, government, religion and technology have taken great strides, but for some reason we have been content to hold onto dreadful rules in relation to our linguistic communication.
Grammar elites would like you to believe that English has reached some sort of noble pinnacle of perfection. A plateau of excellence that cannot be deviated from or swayed from its perfectionism.
The truth is, language is an organic expression that is constantly growing and expanding. This perpetual building and morphing of our communication is a natural progression of how we as a species express our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. To hold that core expression to a set of rules developed decades and even centuries ago is simply an asinine proposition.
The development of Ebonics and texting are perfect examples of how the evolution of communication has surpassed these stagnant rules to better express one’s feelings. Though these two examples are fiercely opposed to the status quo guidelines of grammar and syntax, they immediately offer a more efficient manner to communicate one's thoughts. Their brevity and poignant meanings serve to better convey messages in a contemporary form of our language.
Altered spellings, or may I say more logical spellings that are incorporated into these models harken back to an era when such intellectual greats as Ben Franklin developed a more manageable alphabet. Franklin's proposed “Phonetic Alphabet” served to eliminate the duality of many of the English vowels by adding six new letters for sounds that he thought “lacked unambiguous orthographic representation.” He also wanted to eliminate c, j, q, w, x, and y, which he considered to be redundant.
If we are to examine spelling and the rules that have troubled us all since elementary school we would soon begin to realize that there are more exceptions to the rules than rules themselves.
Why does THROUGH get spoken differently than ENOUGH and why does WEIGHT sound like LATE and WAIT for that matter?
There are also innumerable words that are spoken in two different ways, although they have identical spellings. For example: I was standing in the WIND trying to WIND my watch with my POLISH friend who had a pet SOW and would SOW grain in the spring and POLISH his tractor every evening. He also had a DOVE, but one NIGHT it DOVE into the SEWER because he thought he saw a KNIGHT sitting beside his old grandmother who was a SEWER. However, his PRESENT thought was INVALID because it was just me stopping by to give his INVALID grandmother a PRESENT.
As I came in, my friend asked me to CLOSE the door and since it was CLOSE to EIGHT we ATE.
Moreover, unified spelling did not come to fruition until the invention of printed text, thus developing a need for a common letter set that was manipulated by early typesetters in an effort to justify their type.
Even the great playwright William Shakespeare took the liberty of spelling something as personal as his name in several different ways.
If all this has made your head spin, be confident in knowing that the dichotomy of our language even got the best of President Andrew Jackson, who voiced his aggravation while trying to write a presidential paper and cried out, "It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!"
Josh Drespling
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About Josh Drespling: Josh is a former graphic designer at The News. His blog appears each Saturday.
Discussion
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