Sometimes you need to be “educated” to be this stupid.
Two viewers of the YouTube video “Language & Reality in the Liberal Arts” informed me that correct spelling and grammar is “elitist” and “oppressive.”
My initial reaction?
Kiel;w, bnpwl opie;a ie;’’a b’io/ioehj.
Often, as I see it, individuals take a partial truth but then stretch it out of proportion turning it into an untruth. There’s no reason why cat absolutely must have the spelling “cat.” The sign “cat” is an English convention.
As the brilliant essayist Theodore Dalrymple writes in his book Life at the Bottom, throwing away the supposed “oppressive” forms of conventional language standards, based on an egalitarian worldview, will entrap a poor family into remaining poor: “Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste, almost, of Untouchables.”
It’s difficult to think of a better way to destroy someone’s social, intellectual, and economic mobility. Isn’t it ironic?
Of course, language is not a static thing. It changes! And a good writer sometimes does play fast-and-lose with the standard rules.
Shakespeare’s English is not our English.
Grammar can be better or worse in a time and place, and that surely affects the quality of someone’s speech or writing. There’s a kind of underlying logic in simply understanding the subject-predicate relationship. We can definitely write incoherently!
While there are borderline disputes in “higher” grammar or spelling, there are traditional conventions that everyone accepts – and these conventions allow you and me to talk to each other.
Let’s stick with a traditional educator like Sister Miriam Joseph. Her book The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric will prevent us from being that stupid.
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I’ve uploaded a few other YouTube videos that reference Sister Jospeh’s outstanding text: