BIG, BIG WORDS

When I was a kid we used a question to impress others with our vast knowledge of words. It was this:

"Do you have the AUDACITY to doubt my VERACITY and to INSINUATE that I PREVARICATE? "

It was fun to be able to throw the question around and to act as if we were offended by the thought that someone had indicated that we had told a lie.

I was thinking about this as a signal to me that from an early age the power of words was something within grasp. By the time I was in Junior High (we never had heard of "middle school" in those days!) I was aware of that fact, and my Junior High School English teacher was a key to it. She introduced us to the practice of sentence diagramming, in which we laid out a sentence on paper according to its design. Nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, predicate adjectives, adverbs...they all went into their proper place.

It was so clear, visually, that the word "I" was used instead of "me" because it followed an intransitive verb "was." To use "me" was akin to chewing with your mouth open or drinking from the milk bottle from the refrigerator. We might have been a small,blue collar village , but we were going to speak and write properly.

It makes me wonder how the Earth moved to bring us to the place where the importance of grammar is discounted. I suspect it came from the practice of teachers encouraging students to write freely, without regard for syntax, spelling, or grammatical error. Expression was the important issue. Stopping for correction stifled thought. It was a small, but important part, of the growing importance of speed and productivity over quality of production. Industry experienced it and it led to poor construction and lack of buyer confidence. Our "I want it, and I want it now" mentality crept into our language, leading to sloppiness at the expense of speed.

I have heard it said that when blogging, text messaging, e-mailing, or Twittering it is important to get the message out, and to get it out quickly. The sender is encouraged to hit the send button quickly, to save the integrity of the message. It preserves the intent of the sender. I have watched people text messaging and the speed of their interaction is awesome. My style is to create it, review it, use spell-check, utilize the Preview option and then publish the item when it is correct.

I watched the movie Bright Star recently, the story of John Keats, the recognized English poet. He and his associate would labor for days over the creation of a poem, struggling with the selection of words, the layout of the poem on the page, and the sound of the words when read aloud. It was a tedious process for the creation of an art form. I'm not that precise, but I was impressed with the work that went into the production of a beautiful love poem.

I recognize that this is a generational thing. We live in a time when the whole mode, method and purpose of inter-personal communication has evolved to a new place. Technology has brought with it new understandings and new rules. I'm just a dinosaur, caught up in a lost age, trying to impose past standards on new methods. It's like reaching with the left foot for the button to lower the high beams on the car. It isn't there anymore.

But there is another point to be made in this dialogue and it is brought home by my remembering the Big Words sentence with which I began this blog. Employing a broad vocabulary is not the only goal (or even the best goal) of speaking the English language. Clear communication is right up there at the top of the list. It's about more than ego; it's about a desire to be respectful of the reader as well.

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