Modern English

Rick Melén

When the days get shorter and the trees get barer and the air gets chillier, I still get an ill feeling in the pit of my stomach that reminds me that I didn't a complete homework assignment I had 51 years ago. My grade-point average was constantly beaten up in school because it was too small to defend itself.

Some classes were worse than others. In the seventh grade I was informed that I had to take a language course as part of the curriculum. I said I AM, and I SUCK at it. They told me that English class doesn't count. So I took Latin, which I now speak fluently, as long as you only want to know if the fields are in Rome. I probably could ask where the bathroom is also, if I supplemented using basic sign language. The only useful thing I learned is how to pluralize any word in English that has a Latin root. Thus, I can tell you that the plural for "curriculum" is "curricula," which makes me sound like such an egregious pedant that I could never say it out loud with a straight face. ("Egregious pedant" also translates to "dork.") And that's why Latin is a dead language.

English, on the other hand, is spoken by 88 million people, all at the same time, so that they have to repeat everything twice. Most people misuse the English language to convey thoughts and ideas, so I'm going to help free you of the traditional confines of the language. I feel sorry for people who come to this country expecting to learn to speak English. There so many inconsistencies and broken maxims that it feels like somebody made up the rules as they went along.

"I" before "e" except after "c?" Words that don't follow that simple rule seem "weird" and "foreign." Writing a paper, a teacher once told me that I had a dangling participle. I took that as a compliment.

Many people overuse the semi-colon; they should undergo a semi-colonoscopy to find out why. Should you use "its" or "it's?" It's often hard to understand its use. Should you use "there," "their" or "they're?" It depends on what they have, what they do and where they are. I would discuss tense, but instead I would recommend a good massage.

Some words seem to infiltrate the language independently of any discernable root. Any time you buy something refurbished, ask yourself, why wasn't it furbished correctly in the first place? "Indefatigable" seems like the long way around a word that should maybe just be "fatigable." "Disingenuous" is another word that never seems to show up with less syllables. You never read, "'Wow, your super-short haircut looks WONDERFUL,' he said to his wife 'ingenuously.'" Same with "Unruly" or "distraught." "I was 'straught' that the class I was teaching was so 'ruly.'"

To further complicate matters, we are in the nascency of AI trying to learn everything we're most prone to say or do. So now, writers are just supplying phrases and expecting algorithms to know what they're talking about. For example, somebody connected with the team was recently quoted as saying that the Giant's quarterback needs to grow as a professional and stop all the "kitty stuff." Perhaps he meant "kiddie stuff," or perhaps his cat has a tendency either to throw into double coverage or knock all the pens off the table. AI is not doing much for the language just yet.

Sometimes I goad my cellphone's auto-suggest when I text. I type in a phrase, like, "I'm going to..." and look at the auto-suggestions it provides, to see what it thinks I might be in the mood to do. But even after all this time together, it's obvious that my phone hardly knows me at all.

Idioms are difficult for the novice to understand. Why shouldn't you beat a dead horse? I wouldn't even bother to race one that was still alive, I wouldn't stand a chance. Why shouldn't you get a taste of your own medicine? Someone else's medicine is going to cure me? I could care less. Or maybe I COULDN'T care less. I don't really understand them myself.

Even more difficult for those new to the English language is understanding humor. I feel that people who don't laugh at my jokes probably don't comprehend the finer elements of the language. What other explanation could there be? Things like subtlety, nuance and understated humor are concepts that I like to beat into the ground with a 16-pound sledgehammer.

So, say what's on your mind, as long as you don't mind being misunderstood most of the time. To sound smarter, throw in words like "conceit" or "zeitgeist" and see if it "informs," well, anything. As a writer, you have artistic license, but you still have to be careful driving home a point, especially if you've been drinking. I once wrote two run-on sentences next to each other and I had to get the hell out of the way or I would have been killed. And yet, writing is still often the most accurate way to express yourself. I was never the laconic type, to say the least, which means I never said the least. That goes without saying.

Join Rick and Trillium at Back 9 in Cortlandt on Friday, Oct. 2. Say hello at rlife8@hotmail.com.