I can’t stand it anymore! At a restaurant the other night I felt like jumping up and grabbing the two millennials at the table next to ours by the throat and screaming “Stop it!” Between the gravel in their throats and the upticks at the end of sentences that each had a minimum of three “likes” in them, my wife and I cringed. It actually ruined what would have otherwise been a very nice dinner at our favorite dining spot. (If you don’t know what vocal fry and upticks are all about, just do a search on YouTube.)
It’s everywhere, not just in public but also in the workplace. What was particularly jarring was that the girls were talking about their college experiences and their schools were two of the best in the nation! How faculties can allow their students to graduate high school much less college without an ability to string two coherent and grammatically correct English sentences together is shocking and lamentable!
In our day, the filler words were “you know”. “It was nice at the beach yesterday, you know?” “I can’t understand, you know, how she could have said that.” “You know” was annoying, but I guess we were blessed that the painful vocal fry and uptick problems weren’t so common.
There were regional accents of course: Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens; Midwest; Minnesotan; Texas; Boston Brahmin, Southern and Deep Southern. None were offensive. They were quaint. At times, incomprehensible, but quaint, not grating!
Today, however, I often feel like I’m in a foreign country. Mind you, it’s not the actual foreigners and recent immigrants with whom I have trouble communicating. It’s most often those born here whom I can’t understand!
Other pet peeves…
Starting a sentence with “So”. I don’t know whether it’s supposed to make the speaker sound smarter, whether it’s just another filler phrase, or whether it’s like a cat that hunches down, sticks its butt in the air and flicks its tale before pouncing, but this too is such an annoying corruption of our language!
“Right?” It’s incredibly annoying to hear people end their sentences not just with an uptick but the word right, right?”
Oh, and there are the slightly more sophisticated but equally obnoxious phrases, “Let me be clear”, “To be completely honest”, or “At the end of the day.” You get the idea.
Perhaps it’s because my wife is English that I’m more bothered than most about the deterioration of our grammar and diction. You know the Brits… whether they’re from Chelsea and speak “frightfully” or are from London’s East End and speak like Eliza Doolittle before her transformation in My Fair Lady, or the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins, they always sound so much more educated and serious than we. Let’s be fair, however. The way they speak and spell English can also be troublesome! But, as she constantly reminds me whenever we get into a spat about the proper way to phrase something, “Just remember, we gave you the language!” End of conversation.
Back in the stone age of 1972 William F. Buckley gave a guest lecture at my college. The auditorium was filled with 60’s vintage, recycled hippies and liberal academics. After laying out the ‘conservative case’ he took questions. The showboating engaged in by the Leftists as they asked pointed and mostly insulting questions was classic drivel. I’ll never forget, however, the extraordinarily deft way that Buckley calmly used incisive, fact-supported arguments, words and language to thoroughly gut each and every one of his antagonists. His mastery of English was incomparable. He also had that great side flick of the tongue to accompany his responses, and when the moderator finally submitted to the shellacking being dealt out, ending the session, the handful of us in the audience who weren’t 60’s radicals or poor attempts at imitation thereof stood up and loudly and unapologetically applauded!
While we’re trying to take back our country from Leftists, let’s try to restore American English to its proper, beautiful state…the English as written by our Founding Fathers. The English we heard spoken by the likes of Lincoln, Reagan, and William F. Buckley. And let’s try to restrain ourselves from wringing the necks of the valley-talk kids around us!
