A twinkly-eyed customs agent at Heathrow would say I don't even speak English. When I arrived at his station in 2008, fresh off a trip to Prague, I breathily spat that I was "so glad to be back where I could speak English."
He looked at me with an eye roll.
"So is that what you call what you speak in your country."
It was enough to bother me for, oh, since 2008.
It's a story I recant as often as it's appropriate, but lately whenever I'm explaining to my French ESL student why we speak and write the way we do and how this differs across the pond.
Unfortunately, I'm finding I have to also defend myself in my own country and outside the tutoring environment. Like when I'm watching a L'oreal Paris commercial and they brag that their product means "less wrinkles".
Less wrinkles?!
What happens when my student sees this, especially after one of our lessons on non-countable vs. countable nouns and when to use less versus fewer. The rule, of course, is that less goes with the non-countable nouns such as water, money, courage, etc. Fewer is used with everything one can count, from bridges to pimples to journalists.
When I explained to my student that he should also say "I am well" instead of "I am good" he responded that no one at his company talked like that.
Of course they don't.
They're engineers.
Why would professionals who scraped to get through eight years at Brown come out sounding anything like a proper English-speaking man or woman?
The answer? Because it's not cool. It's not cool to say "I am well" or "There are fewer wrinkles from using this product" or even, in some circles, "We don't have any use for that."
Trust me, plenty of the riders on the O bus into New Haven are saying they are good; they have less wrinkles; and they don't have no use for that.
It's becoming so common that I want to wear ear plugs when I walk outside or turn on the television.
Thank you, HBO for smart programming and thank you, New York Times for all your smart reporters. Thank you, Shakespeare, for ever existing and holding up the bar for all of us to reach -- or apparently spill over when we're blathering on about how we ain't gunna get none tonight and how gud we're feelin', all things considered.
And of course, texting just makes it worse. Why say boyfriend if one can text "bf"; but wait, that's best friend, right? By the way, who takes the time to say "One" when it's more common to say "You"?
Why are my grammar panties all in a wad over this, or as one journalist accused today, that I was going all #grammarpolice on him?
Because it matters.
Because if we don't speak and write correctly then one day, no one will even remember what it was to communicate properly. It matters especially for writers, journalists, teachers, scientists and other intellectuals to use the right words, proper punctuation and sound metaphors and similes. I used to be against clichés but you know what, why not. I use them when I speak so bring them on.
I choose my battles, and this week the battle is about "fewer" versus "less".
Yes, my great-great grandmother was a school marm. Grandma "Pink". She even had pink cheeks. I can picture her tottering into that one-room schoolhouse in West Texas, pounding the desk to get some upstart to shut up.
Then Grandma Pink asked the little weasel to come up, pop his gum out, and sit back down.
"The ABC's," she said, "are very important. After all, if you want to grow up to be President Lincoln, you may want to learn a thing or two."
Snickering.
Sure.
"Who's laughing?"
She'd saunter back to the offending student and ask him to please explain why it was laughable to insult her. Why was an English lesson funny?
The kid, of course, did not have an answer.
In modern times, this author would laugh at her very own English Honors teacher, Mrs. Woods, who, in the author's senior year of high school, would introduce her to classical music and Don Quixote before she (the student) had even lost her virginity.
Before the days of texting and iPads and Blackberries, before AR-15s on campus and the death knell of the English language here in America, Mrs. Woods would reign.
Naturally, most of her students didn't realize it at the time, but those lessons would last a lifetime.
