DILLIGAF? OMG, ROTFLMAO!
When I was growing up, we had spelling tests--every week or so, you'd be given a new list of words to memorize and regurgitate. Most kids found this a complete waste of time, and railed against it. For the most part, none of us actually studied this list--everybody "winged-it" on the quizzes. I liked to read, so most of the words weren't a big problem for me--I'd seen them often enough in print that I could picture them mentally, so I did fairly well at spitting them back out on command.
Spelling, and its rhetorical cousin, grammar, were considered essential to success in the world of work--in fact, the ability to remember correct sentence construction (and, at the sub-folder level, word construction) served as an indicator of class, a tool for discriminating between those whose parents valued "correctness" in communication, and those who weren't so lucky. We were constantly admonished to make sure the spelling was accurate in term papers, on resumes, on job applications, etc. Fluency in English was considered important to a person's ability to secure higher-income employment, and also as a means of survival in an increasingly divided social environment--who you were, and by extension who you were allowed to associate with, were in part determined by whether or not you could remember certain rules, such as "don't end a sentence with a preposition."
At least that's the line we were fed. As I got older, owing to the fact that I'd been primed by my father to be extra-sensitive to errors in grammar and usage, I began to notice that not only did my contemporaries pretty much abandon any pretense of caring about spelling or construction, so did famous people from "high" walks of life. Senators, Representatives, corporate CEOs...you name it, they make all sorts of elementary grammar errors in their public discourse. I started to notice embarrassingly weak construction in newspaper articles, advertising copy, even business letters sent by companies whose employees represented the supposed "cream of the crop" of the expensively educated. Lately I've begun noticing dozens of spelling errors in published books (not the online kind, I mean the ones that are printed and bound, that you hold in your hand). It drove me to distraction--weren't those people paying attention in third grade? How did they manage to graduate from places like Harvard and Yale, and go on to hold responsible, high-paying jobs, without applying the rules we'd been taught in the elementary grades?
It turns out, in practice (especially since television has become so pervasive in our lives, and the number of networks long ago exceeded the supply of fluent English-speakers) that none of it matters. We don't value language. I've begun to wonder if we ever did.
What IS our language, anyway, but a mish-mash of colloqialisms that found their way into our dictionaries and our rhetoric through endless repetition? English is constantly evolving, and it's like the body of law in the United States--constantly being amended, new rules being written to account for variations (as opposed to the variations being reined in to fit the existing rules), and new standards of acceptability being formed in order to accomodate common practices that, despite the frustration of grammarians, have achieved critical mass through sheer gravity--"everybody says so," so the rules are changed to coincide with the mass consciousness.
Now, you could follow all this if you cared to (and some people DO make a study of language in that level of detail), but the number of rules and exceptions, just like the number of federal laws and regulations, has become so large and unwieldy that no single person could ever really hope to assimilate it. In truth, that threshold was reached long before I was born, and our language has become exponentially more complicated since. So why was it forced down our throats in school? Nobody follows the rules, and precious few but the most erudite and eloquent ever did. Even Senator Edward M. Kennedy, child of American royalty, Harvard Law graduate, and recent subject of dozens of television retrospectives (one of which contained the error that caught my attention) couldn't quite muddle through without screwing up every so often.
The conclusion? It was a scam. A well-meant one, to be sure. Our parents and teachers attempted to give us rules to enhance our chances of survival and achievement in society, and at the time we were taught those rules, we had no way of knowing that, like the tenets of the "Pirate Code" in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, "they be more like guidlelines, really."
And it's not just spelling or grammar. All sorts of rules fall under the umbrella of the time-honored phrase, "do as I say, not as I do." As we are constantly reminded, the most exhalted among us are often those whose adherence to time-honored codes of morality, ethics, law (and yes, grammar) is the LEAST exemplary. Those who pontificate most loudly about biblical principles are as likely as not to be the ones publicly caught with their pants down, having blatantly disregarded three fifths of the commandments they battle so fiercely to have chiseled into the granite of our public buildings.
They blather on about the ills of our society, blaming all on the "loose morality" of our times, yet when publicly disgraced for having set the worst possible example for America's youth, they stick to their guns, refuse to resign, refuse to apologize, and in so doing expose, for all to see, their utter contempt for the rules they expect everyone ELSE to follow.
The difference, of course, is that these hypocrites are rich and powerful (which, in their eyes, exempts them from polite codes of behavior). But that's an all-too-familiar tangent, one I'll avoid for the moment so that I can pursue my admittedly long-winded, circuitous route to the point: The kids are LTAO (laughing their asses off) at us right now.
When we (and I'm referring to the pre-internet, pre-IM, pre-text-message generation) were growing up, our elders were the source of most of our information. We didn't watch Huntley and Brinkley (nor did we care to), we didn't know a tenth of what was actually going on in the world, and we actually believed that the rules our elders drummed into our heads were "carved in stone," that bad behavior would result in negative consequences, and that, in essence, spelling counted.
Then we grew up.
Our parents, before us, had grown up, too. They'd discovered that the Ten Commandments were "more like guidelines," and that the Eleventh Commandment, the really important one, the one we were never taught but which everyone eventually learned through bitter experience, was "Don't Get Caught."
But our parents (and the instinct persists in our generation, as likely it will in generations to follow) feared for us--for our safety, our cognitive development, our world views, and our ability to survive. So they sheltered us from the harsher truths, and did their best to provide a firm ethical, verbal, and educational foundation for us to stand on, in the desparate hope that they wouldn't wake up one morning to find our pictures in the paper--lifeless, tongue hanging out, lying on the floor of a flophouse with a needle still protruding from one arm. They wanted to protect us from the predators of the world, and clung fast to the illusion that by sheltering us from the worst of human behavior, we would grow up to live in places where that kind of horror didn't affect us.
Now our kids are able to circumnavigate all that--they are able to find out for themselves, in every gory detail, what actually happens in the world--or at least what appears to happen, according to their myriad electronic information sources. They may not be interested in politics (and who could blame them, given the spittle-laced vitriol that passes for "news" today), but they're very aware that the highest-ranking politicians are among the most profligate adulters, liars, theives, and murders in the human race. They're well-"schooled" in the idea that honesty is for suckers, that treating people fairly and with good will gets you nowhere (but that perpetrating the worst kind of evil can make you famous, rich, and powerful). They see 20-year-old millionaires in sports, film, music, and even in online business, and as far as they can tell, the best fortunes are made quickly--that there's a "secret," and if they can just google it, they'll be able to bypass all the work, the study, and the tedium their parents tell them is necessary, and live the high life, consuming as if there were no tomorrow.
The examples we provide them don't point to virtue, or even to competence. They point to sly, underhanded dealings, to manipulating and changing the rules to fit their own agendas, and to taking advantage of the ignorance of others to make a better life for themselves. Our media add mega-gallons of fuel to the fire, by exhalting those who've achieved the three virtues of American life--wealth, fame, & power.
So--why are we suprised when we hear about "The Family," the secret society associated with "C Street," and their contention that certain people are above reproach, that "gawd's work" is best left in the hands of a chosen few whose wealth and power is pre-ordained by a "higher power," and whose shit doesn't stink? Every bit of available information tells us that it doesn't matter HOW you do it, what's important is that you "get yours NOW," and leave the consequences to somebody else. Do we punish those who are caught cheating? No. We give them millions in free publicity, buy their "tell all" books, and make them even richer (and by extension more powerful) all by virtue of their notoriety, no matter how it was achieved. If the story is REALLY juicy, we turn it into a TV mini-series (and pay them millions for the rights). By the time their cases get to court, they've already drunk all the Chivas, driven all the Lamborghinis, snorted all the blow, and diddled all the pussy their bodies can stand. So it's "worth it."
And if they "don't get caught," the Chamber of Commerce will build a statue in their honor.
So no, Virgina, spelling doesn't count. Grammar doesn't count. Honesty is for suckers. Go to the right church, say the right things, stick to the Right wing, kiss the right asses, learn the right tricks, and you can "succeed" in America, the land of opportunity.
The current generation is wiser to the ways of the world than we are--we may not "get it," but they do, and they're moving so fast that we long ago lost any hope of following their thought patterns. I don't know where that will lead us, but it's out of our hands now. The home-schoolers may think they can wrench the barn doors shut, but the horses are long gone, never to return.
It's time we dealt with reality as it exists, and quit trying to pretend it doesn't. In so doing, we only hurt ourselves--our kids will take care of themselves, it seems. Who's going to take care of US?
