Janet enters
the murder room. Her husband is on the
floor in a pool of blood. On the wall, written in blood, is the message, youre
next. She leans over, dips her
finger in her husband’s blood, and on the wall puts an apostrophe: you’re.
I love
language, though I often abuse it - too lazy to go back over what I have typed
and put in the apostrophes, or just comfortable with the way I have expressed
myself.
I am not a
stickler on correct spelling and grammar (but thank you Microsoft for your
spell checker). To me, the purpose of
language is to communicate.
Communication
is different in different cultures. I
was told by an Athabaskan Indian in a Native village that white men talk too
much. And he was right. We can’t stand dead air space in a
conversation.
When we
first arrived in the villages, we might have two Native women come to the
house; we would greet them and they would nod their heads. We would give them tea and they would sit on
the couch silently drinking their tea.
Then at some point they would state what they had come over for; perhaps,
My son not like go to school. In
the meantime, we had filled the room with rambling words and sentences in an
attempt to fill the void.
An Inuit can
often express a entire meaning with the rise of an eyebrow. I am still furious when I think about
standardized testing judging the children in these remote villages from a
requirement they write essays in standard and correct grammar. Their
stories are rich when expressed in their own village language.
We all
misuse words; but their origins are interesting. Here is some word rambling:
The word decimate
literally means - to slaughter every tenth one.
The word dilemma,
the di comes from the Greek for two; so the meaning is limited to two
choices. The dilemma of choosing
the road ahead or the one less traveled.
Thanks to
computers we can modify grammar with bold or italic entries. I love semicolons and dashes. Again,
language is all about communicating your thoughts.
So a great
fuck-you to the word police who would willingly destroy a thought in the name
of inane rules.
the Ol’Buzzard
