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I am a writer; that is to say I’m an alcoholic. The link between alcoholism and writing ability is the only reliable indicator of good and profound writing. The buzz of inspiration that alcohol gives, with the amplification of emotions that goes with it, absolutely renders the drunkard the better storyteller.
Though the academic accuracy of my scrawl may suffer, alcohol definitely renders my writing much more legible and coherent than any strict adherence to grammatical ritualism and proper spelling ever could hope to produce.
There is profundity in the ambiguous which the precise can netter aspire to! So damn all those grammar Nazis and the spelling police—with a gun against my head (or sufficiently large check guaranteed me post publication), I too could make the Queen of England weep with pride as I demonstrate my super fluency in the English language. But as this is a hobby, and one conducted under the influence of alcohol, I have no time for such unwarranted perfectionism.
This is to show that while I am guilty of the sins I will be condemning in the rest of this article, I, at least, have a conscience about it, and I could do better.
But let me first pacify my usual detractors by stating that this article is actually not about me but about the dire state of linguistic competency in this highly digital world we persist in today.
People simply don’t read anymore. If you spend tedious hours writing content for a website, only to see the google analytics indicate that someone never made it much further than the first paragraph, you realize that people today are absolutely incapable of reading and absorbing information.
This worries me. Your thoughts can only be as complex as your mastery of a given language. If you cannot say it, you can’t think it!
Language—not the wheel—is humanity’s greatest invention, and that tells us something when this great technological wonder of speech, writing, and reading are becoming unwieldy by the average person who now consider reading a few 100-character tweets to be a healthy exercise of their literary faculties.
This short attention span that most people have inherited from the internet age is like a mass ADHD outbreak—and it’s only going to get worse.
On the internet (particularly in chat rooms, social media feeds, and certain websites), you will hardly recognize the English language—her decorator splendor reduced to mutilations of grammar and spelling that could not be justified even under acute inebriation!
Now if these people are writing sober and can disfigure the English language like I cannot hope to emulate after chugging down a bottle of whisky, then what does that say about the gap in literacy (and precision of thought) that squeezes itself between an undisciplined scribbler like me and the average internet user?
You need an urban dictionary to make sense of the internet, and sadly there is no lexicon to decipher the grammatical steganography that accompanies the inane spelling.
As I peruse the headlines, social media feeds, and comments boxes of the internet, I get a deep sense that there was (and unbeknownst to me, at that) a successful revolt against intelligence in general and literacy in particular.
When a language burns, so does the culture related to it and the genius born from it! Therefore, this is not merely the uninvited lamenting of a grammarian and/or spelling bee champion. There is much that goes down the drain when we pull the plug on literacy.
Honestly, I don’t know how much longer I can hope to be clearly understood if I persist in using ‘proper’ English. I dare not plunge to the depths of depravity as those who have abandoned syntactic accuracy to save but a few keystroke’s worth of effort. Personally, I don’t consider the tradeoff to be worth it.
In decades to come, I may find myself an unwilling member of a few remaining English speakers who have unwittingly become the custodians for the language as she once appeared and spread to the four corners of the earth.
These are troubled times to be a literate person, and I fear darker days ahead.
In pace requiescat, o English language!
