The Death of the Pen... the Keyboard Hasn't Fared too Well Either

On the radio the other day, I once again heard someone claim that if you stick a bunch of monkeys in a room with a typewriter, given enough time they will write the great American novel. Personally, I reckon this is probably apeshit. All the laws of averages are against it, no matter how much time is given (the typewriter itself would likely only last until the first monkey got mad and flung poo at it). In all likelyhood, you could give a hundred monkeys a thousand years and maybe you would get "see spot run". Not the childrens' book, just those words; and they'd probably be spelled along the lines of "c spot rn."

Then suddenly, it occured to me: if indeed that's what the monkeys came up with, they would be about on par with the average Young American in terms of their mastery of the written English word.

Seriously, I don't get it. Daily I read emails and blog postings all over the web, written by grown men and women, which seem as though they were written by twelve-year-olds. Actually, it's worse than that. By age twelve, one should have at least the concept of complete sentences mastered. Today most, or at least far too many, college students don't.

By the time one is out of high school, grammatical errors should be reserved for only the trickiest minutia of the language. Spelling and punctuation errors should amount to nothing more than simple typing mistakes. More and more I'm finding that people are ignorant of most rules of grammar, and of the very existence of punctuation (those little symbols on your keyboard were not put there for the purpose of making winking, sideways smiley faces). The word "were" is used when "we're" is meant, alongside "cant", "wont" and "dont". Of all the punctuation marks, I think the apostrophe has been taken the hardest hit. Spelling seems to be done by "sounding out" words, the way we did in first grade. Capitalization is becoming a lost art.

Spelling has collapsed under the weight of ignorance and laziness. People don't know what words mean, or what words belong where, and they just can't be bothered to find out, or even to type a few extra letters when they do know better. The letter "u" is not a word. Neither is "ur", and it is not interchangable with "your" or "you're", which are not interchangable with each other. Seriously, would it kill you to type two to five extra charachters? Is it so difficult to check a dictionary or thesaurus when needed (there are many good ones online)? I suppose this must be too much to ask. Illiteracy is so much easier.

When you come down to it, the ability to write is nothing more than the ability to think on paper. A person who writes on a fourth grade level is indicates to his or her reader a deficit of intelligence. Some people think this is unfair. Tough shit. If you form a written thought the way a mongoloid forms a verbal one, expect to be presumed stupid. This goes double if you're writing in a business capacity. In my booking business, I'm always wary of band members, promoters and especially club owners who write as though they are barely lettered. I assume that if they won't show enough professionalism to write a proper letter, they probably wont show much in any other area either. This is the default assumption of a great many businessmen. We're usually proven right.

I neither speak nor write The King's English, but I know most basic rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. This is through no great talent or intellect of my own (those who know me already know I really don't have much of either), but because I was taught them when I was young. Thing is, I learned them at the same shitty public schools that everyone else in my hometown attended, which are no better or worse than most schools in Maryland, so what the hell happened to everyone else?

I think Rex Harrison, in his crowning stage and screen portrayal of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady put it best when he said:

"One should rightfully be hung, for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue."*

One might also do well avenge the fatal neglect of the pen.

*He also said of the language "...in America they haven't used it for years." Score two for Hank.