Apr 16, 2018 3 min read

When the English language finally gives up the ghost, who will mourn it?

I used to think that former English majors might stage a last stand, hunkering down in an abandoned coal tipple outside New Martinsville, W.Va. There, they could issue succinct, well-edited press releases that contained no dangling participles and offering rewards for the creative use of gerunds.

But I lost hope when I read an article on Mashable.com that quoted a U.K. English Linguistics lecturer who praised millennials for “breaking the constraints” of written English.” How? By abandoning such useless items as apostrophes (cant, wont didnt, im) and standard capitalization – proper names are not always capitalized, while acronyms are, and brand names or countries may be. Even periods at the ends of sentences are sometimes eliminated because millennials apparently think they are better used to indicate that the texter is angry. As in: “OMG bobby ate all my Fritos I dont like him.” Apparently this is the text equivalent adding extra emphasis as if saying, “I don’t like him. Period!”

But I hesitate to credit those who came of age in the 21st century with the creation of a groundbreaking approach to English. Not using standard punctuation is nothing new. Author E. E. Cummings (or e e cummings) produced poetry in this manner. And as early as 1916, Don Marquis, a writer for the Evening Sun in New York, displayed witticisms supposedly written by Archy, a cockroach. Unable to work the shift key, Archy’s poems were all lowercase and sans punctuation. Everyone thought author James Joyce was nuts because the final 24,048 words in the novel “Ulysses” contained only two periods and one lonely comma. Now linguistics lecturers are praising millennials for doing the same.

Truth is, I believe millenials were too lazy to learn the long-standing rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation that have served us well for nigh unto 300 years. So they invented their own way of writing, one unduly influenced by smartphone keyboards, which require users to go to a new screen to insert punctuation. This accomplished, millennials found it easy to avoid punctuation altogether, although they don’t seem to find using the shift key to make acronyms too strenuous. I also blame English teachers who for the last 30 years have hesitated to correct grammar and spelling mistakes because they fear it will dampen students’ creativity.

I’ll admit that the grammar police can sometimes be overzealous. When I was a public relations writer, one of my colleagues accidentally left out one semicolon in a newsletter. About a week after it was published, she received a copy back – anonymously – with a bright red-ink circle around the space where the AWOL punctuation mark should have been. Scribbled in the same red ink was this comment: “This is the type of shoddy work than makes us all look bad!”

These days, she’d probably get a text: “OMG! u left out that thing i couldnt read ur paper.”

So, next time you see poor ole English limping along, its participles dangling, take pity. Offer a kind word.

When it dies, you’ll be left speechless.