Literacy

The following was written in response to a relative’s sending me the following link:

http://www.globecampus.ca/blogs/parents-view/

Oh, Lordy! Don’t get me started!

From the time when the children were in elementary school, and I’d send the school handouts back to the principal with the spelling, punctuation and grammar corrected, to the working world in an office, trying to make sure that letters to clients and diary entries on the work log are at least comprehensible, never mind professional – it has been a losing battle.

If our educators (those that make the policies) had thought that literacy was important, it would have been taught. They didn’t, it wasn’t – and now we’re left with a population where most under 50 think that the way they communicate on e-mail or cell phone text is the height of communicative skill.

And for anyone who reads a brief look at newspapers or recently published books will tell you that even the supposed “editors” are illiterate. Reading has started to aggravate me so much that I’m turning vigilante and reading with a red pen in hand to correct errors so that the next reader isn’t encouraged to think that the mistakes I find are the correct way to do things. I also started clipping mistakes from the local papers and sending them to the editors, but found that that endeavour could take most of the day, many days, so I gave up. And that was over a decade ago, and it’s only gotten worse.

Language vigilantes – Arise! Unite!

It’s “Dew-rag”, for Pete’s sake!!

That thing young people wear on their heads is called a dew-rag, NOT a do-rag.

And it’s NOT a ‘black thing’, it’s a farm thing – as is wearing your hat backwards.

I get so fed up with seeing the language butchered by folks who don’t seem to know anything about what they’re talking about.

I’m a (white) grandmother, and my grandmother wore a dew-rag, and that’s what she called it, as did all the women who worked on farms, or even did their own housecleaning, back in the day.

My grandmother explained to me that it was called a dew-rag, because women in those days weren’t allowed to do anything as vulgar as sweat – instead they “got all dewy”. And the rag was there to ‘soak up the dew on their brows’.

And this whole thing with wearing your hat backwards – give me a break! Farms, plantations, road gangs – all those guys wore their hats backwards. Well, after billed caps were invented, and provided they were lucky enough to have a hat at all. The purpose was to protect their necks from the sun while they were bent over working. The boss wore his brim forward to shade his eyes so he could keep an eye on the workers.

I would see it as being more constructive to emulate something a bit more forward looking.

Neither of these clothing choices was invented by the current young generation, and both look back to a hard past – a time that is still being lived out in many countries. Just because we have been fortunate enough to leave much of that behind doesn’t seem to be a good reason to trivialize those customs.

And then there is the fad of wearing jail-house attire. Shoes flopping off the feet, great baggy clothes. Why are we allowing our youth (and Heaven forfend!, sometimes copying them) to glorify the criminal class, and then in the next breath whining about the crime rate? We can’t have it both ways – but that’s a whole other story, too . . .

My NEW Amusement

Hoo-boy, am I ever having fun with this!

It started out from necessity, having my ears a bit plugged, so in order to catch the dialogue on the TV and not disturb the neighbours, I turned on the captioning option.  I’ve left it on just for fun, though some days it’s more a strain not to bang your head than it is a giggle.

If you ever want to see what kind of impoverished vocabularies people who have gone through our dumbed-down reading and English classes have got, then this is the way to do it.  Some of the mistakes are simply hilarious, as on one of Sir David Attenborough’s bird shows, where he was talking about a budgerigar, and it came up on the captioning as bugery guard.

Sometimes the captioning is so bad, that I wonder how those who rely on it solely have any clue as to what is really going on!  I’m not talking about the odd – or even more – typo, as I know if I had to keep up my keyboarding to the speeds some of those folks talk, it might look a lot like Hungarian.  But things like on the newscasts, countries’ and people’s names spelled so wrongly that if you didn’t already know what they were talking about, you’d never guess at all from what was written.

For those of you who need some cheap thrills and astonishments, turn on your captioning.  It can really be a hoot!!

Getting grouchier about this

Here is a copy of an e-mail I sent to Orvis, after receiving their new clothing catalogue and scanning a few pages:

Please take me off your mailing list.

I will never buy clothng from a company who is ignorant of both proper style names and fabric names.  That would just be asking for trouble.

If you can’t take the care to name your garments properly, what expectation would I have that you would make them properly?

Mock neck sweaters and fine line corduroy just don’t cut it, either in proper names or proper English.

If I had a “mock neck” my head would fall off, for Pete’s sake!

You know what I mean??  I’m fed up with ignorance that is becoming so widespread, I don’t know how we manage to communicate at all some days!

General ignorance and more work words

Well, I’ve got more complaints about folks who don’t seem to understand the basics of their jobs – and this time it’s about food.

A couple times lately I’ve seen examples of people who just don’t seem to know what the words in their own job really mean. I know I’ve said that before, but it’s something that puzzles me.

Went to the local bakery a few days ago, and they had what was called a lemon pound cake for sale. I LOVE lemon pound cake. I grabbed it without really looking at it and brought it home, mouth watering for a slice. What a disappointment – it wasn’t pound cake at all, but a regular risen cake. Not the dense, coarse-crumbed mouth-satisfying weight of a pound cake. I’ll tell you I was ready to pound someone.

Then tonight I stopped for a bit of dinner at a Joy (so-called) Bistro. I ordered a wild mushroom and chicken tagliatelli. Mistake. The chicken was dry, gristly and flavourless, and the pasta was really overcooked as were the mushrooms. On top of that, it had some kind of ugly grease it in that just congealed on the sides of the plate. Totally gross! For dessert I ordered a chocolate shortbread with a white chocolate topping. Well, it sure wasn’t shortbread! There was nothing ‘short’ about it. It was so hard that I got marks on my palms trying to force the tines of the fork through it to get a piece.

But you know, and it makes me really mad, I still can’t get past the thing of being polite and eating it anyway. If an order is wrong, I can send it back, but when it’s just really badly cooked, I just suffer and shut up – at least until I get here.  Some day I’m going to get it together to send back gross food.

I’m sure most of the people who know me would never believe I have a problem like that, since I’m not generally a shrinking violet in other circumstances. I just think that if someone cooks something so badly once, then the second try isn’t likely to be much better, so it wouldn’t be much use to make a fuss. You just don’t go there any more.

And another thing that’s starting to really bug me is organic meat. It seems to me that those who are in that business neither know how to raise the meat properly or butcher it correctly. I really, really want to be able to eat organic meat, and to support local farmers, but it’s getting increasingly hard because the product is just all wrong.

Sometimes the carcase hasn’t been hung properly, the pork has often been let grow way too big, the chickens haven’t been grain finished – it just goes on and on. And since so many of them have sprung up, you have to be really careful that the meat is not turning since they aren’t vigilant about taking it off the tray when it gets whiffy. Except for one place that I discovered who seem to freeze the meat for their freezer section when it’s on its last legs.

The whole organic thing is really a rip off in many ways. If you look at what they’re allowed to put on the fruits and veggies and still call it organic in many states and provinces, you’re not that much further ahead. And the prices are ridiculous. I have an uncle who went organic back in the ’70s, and always has claimed that organic farming is cheaper, if you know what you’re doing, than conventional methods – so the product should also be cheaper. And if you buy at the farmers markets, there’s no middleman, so it should be cheaper still. But no, it’s 2 to 3 times the price of regular produce and meat – and I don’t think I’m going to pay that anymore.

I still won’t buy meat at the grocery store, since I can’t eat it anyway with all the crap they pump into it, but I know a couple good regular butchers who have always had good stuff, and it’s time to go back.

I do think that the animals are generally treated better at the organic farms though, and that’s the hard part for me. I only eat meat a couple times a week as it is, so maybe it’s time to go vegetarian?

Work words

I am also getting distinctly depressed with the prevalence of “moo-zarella” and “halapeenos” (or worse, jala-pe-nos) on cooking shows. Can’t people even articulate the words that are to do with the business they are in?

In real estate, and especially on HGTV, most everything french gets a french pronunciation except foyer, which real estate people insist on pronouncing ‘foy-er’ instead of ‘foy-ay’. Why is that?

And clothing? Good grief!! The number of shops that advertise ‘mock-neck’ sweaters is too numerous to keep track of. I keep trying to tell them that if I had a ‘mock-neck’ my head would really be in trouble – but they just don’t get it. Fabric names get butchered beyond belief.

Dinosaurs and curmudgeons, unite! Do not do business with those whose ignorance about their work is so deep that they can’t even talk about it properly.

Lazy journalists and educators

Has the plural “there are” and its contraction “there’re” been completely erased from the English language? Even SpellChek notes the contraction as an error.

I hear even the supposed best and most literate journalists, newsreaders and commentators using the singular “there is” and its contraction “there’s” in place of the correct plural form.

I find this distinctly depressing.

It’s doubly depressing when the majority of people I can find who actually speak reasonably good English were all educated in foreign countries, whose standards of English instruction are far better than those in North American schools.

I suppose it’s not the end of the world, but it would really bolster my confidence in the education my children and grandchildren were getting if I could find a teacher who could spell.