Showing posts with label grammar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grammar. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

A. J. Clemente: the f-bomb and the death of coherence



This has to be a hoax.

Right?

Beside the fact that the guy immediately fires off the f-bomb (along with a quite charming, accompanying s-bomb), he is absolutely bloody awful, worse than some high school student shooting a YouTube video during spring break.

His partner (whom he seems to address as "man") not only stumbles over her copy (perhaps understandably, since the co-anchor has just bleeped his career all to fxxk) but has a noticeable lisp.





Anchoring is usually considered to be the prestige job in any newsroom. Who knows why, because I think reporters out in the field work much harder and put themselves at far more personal risk. Usually this means careful screening of candidates, not scooping some foul-mouthed idiot off the street.

We won't get into the ludicrous errors passed off as truth,  clownish stumbles in grammar and useage that nobody even notices even more (such as: shouldn't the verb match the subject? Didn't we learn that in kindergarten?)




Here's a very simple example: "Having dug a hole under the fence, Ricky went to look for his missing dog." The worst of it is, people aren't reacting to this kind of verbal soul-murder any more because, like a lot of excruciatingly bad grammar and useage, it is worming its way into passive acceptance and will soon be considered "correct", even cited in modern dictionaries. Do you know why that happens? Because it is done over, and over, and over again until people don't hear it any more. 





A particularly excruciating example pops up in my memory: an anchor introduced a story by talking about "chickadees". "Parents should not be giving chickadees to their children for Easter." Well, THAT seemed right enough.

The clip was, of course, about baby chicks. As in: baby chickens. As in: those little yellow fluffy things that come out of eggs at Easter time (for the express purpose of being mauled to death by children).

Not one person complained or even noticed that chickadees are small, sparrowlike birds that don't migrate but stay here in the winter. They make a sound similar to: chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee. . . (I know, because I have seen/heard them.)





When I wrote in to complain to the station, their response was, "Well, no one else has complained about it." This is a defense I particularly loathe. Why? It's similar to that repugnant question, "Are you sure?" This question denigrates your feelings and in fact negates them completely. If you're not "sure", you're either lying or vacillating so much that nobody should be taking you seriously anyway. And why ask? It means your credibility (not to mention your mental competence) is seriously in question.

"No one else has complained" means that valid, proper complaints require one thing: NUMBERS. The higher the number of complaints, the more seriously they are taken. One person complaining about something is completely irrelevant, making the protestor look like a foaming crackpot who won't have the least effect on the ratings. 





Your complaint will only be considered valid if it's clumped in with hundreds or even thousands of others (but even there, it's in danger of being buried by the lemming stampede of public conformity). If no one else has complained, you might as well keep your mouth shut and go away.






Then again: your comment may have a tiny grain of credibility. But only if you're sure.



http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

I'm like, iconic







Sometimes I think I'm being left behind so swiftly, the people around me are a blur. I'm turning into one of those grannies that picks at grammar and parses sentences.

Or something.

I was never taught to write, not exactly, but reading a gazillion books when I was a grubby little kid taught me something about respect for language. I kind of soaked it in. It hurt me when someone mangled the language, especially in print.

I'm aware of the phenomenon of catch-phrases, words or clumps of words that catch on and become so common that no one notices them any more. The big one right now is "I'm like".

I challenge you to count the number of times each day that you hear "I'm like" (or "he's like", or "they're like," etc.) Everyone says this now, often several times in a sentence. Even Oprah and Katie Couric say it. Does anyone stop to think what it means?

"Like" means, well, either you like something, or you resemble it. "I'm like" seems to be saying, "I don't feel this way, but I feel something like it." It's all happening at a remove.

And don't get me started on "icon/iconic". It proliferates like a cancer. Maybe icon started with computers, who knows, but iconic (which for some reason reminds me of some sort of verbal ice cream cone) has long departed from its original meaning: a person or thing that is representative of an entire culture, a focal point for humanity. (It can also mean, in its original form, a religious object like a statue that becomes an object of veneration.)

Everything's iconic now. Pop singers are iconic. Pants are iconic (if they're Levis). I wince when I see it. Is it one of those words that people think makes them look intelligent if they use it? The worst, but only so far, was an item related to Sex and the City: cupcakes. Yes. Cupcakes are iconic. Or at least, a certain variety sold in New York are iconic.

Maybe some people or things are iconic, like Bogart and Bacall. But they only come along every so often, and usually aren't recognized until after they're dead.

So what's the point of all this? Shit, I got another lousy rejection the other day, and it has me smarting. And aching. I've already published two novels that I am very proud of, but neither one was a hot seller. Since 2005 I've written two more novels and a book of poetry. And I get brushed off everywhere. Agents won't look at me. Why? Maybe because I write in complete sentences! Cupcakes aren't iconic, and I'm not like anything, I am.

The casual mangling of language has become the norm, and if you're like me and care about how to put a sentence together, you're obsolete. Or so it seems right now, after the latest kick in the head has been delivered. I won't quote her exact words, or the Agent Police will get after me.

So I should maybe retitle my latest novel? What should I name the baby?

How's this: "I'm Like, Iconic, Cupcake."