I’M GETTING REALLY ANGRY!

My impatience is showing – and I’m not happy about it.

I cannot contain my irritation that while I was sitting around doing next to nothing – a whole generation had grown up around me – a generation of test-messagers, a generation who stand in line at midnight to buy the new I-Phone so they can be part of “where it’s at!” Hurrah!! \

But I accept it all, understanding that what I feel is part legitimate disdain, but a larger part jealousy. Yes, I am impatient with them because I can’t be impatient with myself. But let me leave all that psychobabble of projection to other armchair would-be shrinks.

I surrender. I accept your right to spend your money foolishly. I accept that you have to create a culture that is yours – not one that is mine, old, dusty and irrelevant.

What I can not tolerate is that you have become part of a dumbed-down generation, dependent on television, not only for your view of the world, but of the priorities and obligations that are part of our lives.

To wit: a few days ago, watching CBC TV news (remembering with regret that once that august organization was a shining light of enlightenment – and if not enlightenment – at least a certain standard of excellence when it came to the English language.

No longer.

We are all, including the young commentators, newspeople, announces, and talk-show hosts, the victims of education via American television.

Why else would I hear this young woman, speaking on the CBC, abandon the once-cherished Canadian (and English) linguistic tradition of how to pronounce the article “the” when it preceded a noun with a vowel. .Remember, we would say “thee edge.”
On CBC she said, having heard it on U.S. TV which long ago abandoned correctness in favour of inner-city jargon. So it is now customary to say “thuh edge.”
My daughter-in-law, who is a school teacher said that some of her students were startled that she added an “n” to the article “a” so than she said “an edge” and not “a edge.” The kids were mystified.

The CBC woman further irritated my by referring to Ralph Klein as the former “pre-meer” of Alberta. In fact, the august (but not for long) CBC is full of promos announcing the “premeer” of new Fall programs Strictly an Americanism, based not on a legitimate reality, but on illiteracy and disregard for the beauties of Shakespeare’s English.

But the vocal critics of language misuse, of solecisms, of bad grammar, of comic-book based literary standards, insist that the language is a dynamic, growing,. Changing thing.

I agree. But change based on new realities is acceptable. Change based on giving dignity to illiteracy – is not.

But hell, when I was in public school our teachers insisted that we pronounce the word “clerk” as “clark.” I didn’t.