A Little Talk on Language Skills

Those who are friends with me on Facebook know how much hatred I have for poor grammar and spellings. Some may call me a subjective idiot for it, but if you think of it, that is the very reason the word grammar was even invented; to put up order and make sure that languages do not get even more distorted making up a modern phenomenon of the the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-8)

Well. Here is the thing. A lot of people say that an intellectual nowadays does not have the same command of the Queen's language a JC dropout had in the Ngwazi days. I am in 92% agreement with that and I think this is a reason for worrying.

There are a couple of reasons why this concerns me. I will put them in the order of importance to me which might not be the same for you. If you are a rational being, however, you will agree with some of the things I say here.

I was talking about the issue of spellings and grammar. Nowadays the biggest platform that exposes this problem is the social networking area. With the influx of smartphones and the not-so-smart phones, Facebook accounts have become a basic things and everyone is on it. There are also many other interaction platforms but for now let us talk about ZuckVille.

Facebook was meant for posting. Posting text that is (those who want to post photos do it on Instagram nowadays. And shame on you if you have ever accused anyone of posting too much on FB). I personally have no issues with seeing a hundred updates from a single person in a day but I have an issue with a post that has too many grammatical and spelling errors. I always say this that I am not a saint on this one, but when this becomes too much it looks as if it was deliberate which gives a lot of mixed feelings; mostly the bad ones though.

The reasons for the hard feelings. The first one is just that I am am easily irritated by these language errors. Simply put. It might be to my desire for perfection in everything (some people have told me I am some sort of utopian guy who lives in fantasies. Works for me though). No big explanations on this one. Its just me, but let us be a bit more objective.

The other reason I hate broken English in our social fronts is the origin of it. These things are nowadays coming from from people who are ideally supposed to know better. Intellectuals. These are supposed to be people who should be writing the appealing stuff in English. Not what's on the ground.

Religious figures. Its not a good thing for someone to post the message of God in broken English, but that happens too. Very distracting, if you think of it and this was evidenced by my friend, Reagan Gonani who clearly said he cannot trust a Pastor who preaches in broken English. Maybe we need to switch to the languages we are the most comfortable with.

All of these give me a headache but the ones that are the most worrying to me are teachers. Now these are the people to whom we trust our children (Well. Not that I have some) for education. Having them willingly expose their incompetence in the very thing that they are supposed to be teaching makes me wonder whether we need to be developing our own curriculums and be homeschooling our children in language skills.

One of the reasons for which we have this serious problem is that most of  us are so much into casual texting and have with time rendered that synonymous.

Maybe it is time we moved from thinking of texting that is not shorthand as too formal. Maybe that could help cure the proper grammar and spelling deficiency syndrome that we have.

I know many do not agree with me that this is a problem. We have to agree to disagree sometimes, right?

Signing off. If exotic is difficult try vernacular but at least get comfortable with one.