Wouldn’t it be dandy if we used swell more often

TIM DUNBAR

dunbar@mscd.edu

    “What are words for, when no one listens anymore?”
    “ Words” – Missing Persons
    Words are the backbone of this newspaper, and, for that matter, any document worth reading. I have loved words since I began speaking them at around 18-months of age. Some words I miss. You just don’t hear anyone refer to themselves as feeling “dandy” anymore, nor is “swell” used much as an adjective these days. Before I die, I would love to be told to “unhand” someone, or to “seize” them.
    Some words I’m not so fond of (“fond,” there’s another one you don’t hear very often in this, the 21st Century). I never saw much use for the contraction “mustn’t,” haven’t found any reason to use the word “cross” as an adjective, and though I’m late much more often than I’m on time, I hardly ever refer to myself as being “tardy.”
    What bothers me the most about both the spoken and the written word in this new millennium, is that it—especially the spoken word—has become a series of one-word utterances. Blame it on the popular media, the undeserved influx of street culture, or just plain laziness, but the current English language doesn’t sound like the one I have tried so hard and so long to master.
    These days, instead of saying “goodbye,” we end our phone conversations with the salutation, “Late’” (because God knows saying the whole word “later” is so taxing to the human vocal system). The first time someone ended a phone conversation with me by saying “late’” I thought the phone line had been cut. What the caller actually said was, “’K, bro’, late’”
    Starting a phone conversation (or “convo” as Cosmopolitan so loves to say) with the irritating and oh, so grammatically incorrect, “Where you at?” is, to me, akin to fingernails on a blackboard. Great for getting attention for when you want to sell your services as, say, a shark hunter, but otherwise worthless. There is a very good reason not to end a sentence in a preposition: you sound stupid when you do. Of course, there are exceptions to even that rule. As Winston Churchill so eloquently—and jokingly—replied when asked whether using a preposition at the end of a sentence was ever acceptable: “That is something up with which I will not put.”
    Lately, we have also become inundated with slang, acronyms, creative spelling (mostly featuring the letter “Z”) and abbreviations. This I blame on the hip-hop culture that thinks it’s being clever when calling the police “5-Oh,” and the city of Atlanta the “ATL” and misspelling virtually everything.
    I consider myself to be a purist, maybe even a word/grammar snob in an “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves” kind of way, so when I see a line of kids’ dolls called “Bratz”—which look like cheap, street corner hookers, by the way—I cringe. I can only imagine documents written by the future adults who played with these dolls as kids: We da homies of da United Statez of da A’ in order ta form a more phat Union, yo…” I shudder at the thought.