ALAN writes:

In December 1919, Cleveland High School in St. Louis undertook an endeavor called “Better Speech Week.” The idea was to encourage good English and discourage careless use of words.

“A dunce cap, of the old-fashioned pattern, is placed upon the head of the boy or girl who uses slang or violates a rule of grammar.”

Imagine that in an American high school today.

Teachers were not exempt from that penalty.

When a boy in class raised his hand and said, “We ain’t made no mistakes,” he was awarded the dunce cap.

The news article reporting the event makes no mention of profanity, which I interpret to mean that its use was nonexistent or so rare as not even to merit mention. Imagine that in an American high school today.

In the school auditorium, students presented a playlet called “Doctor, Watch Your Speech,” which included a song called “Should Better English be Forgot,” sung to the melody of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Nowhere but in the most extreme science fiction-fantasy could Americans today imagine such a thing as “Better Speech Week” or understand why it was a good idea. If they applied to themselves the dunce cap penalty that Cleveland students and teachers applied to themselves in 1919, then 50 percent of Americans today would be wearing dunce caps. But that is a conservative estimate.

The way that Americans speak today makes actor Frank Gorshin’s beatnik character “Blake Barton” sound good by comparison. (In the 1960 motion picture musical Bells Are Ringing.) In fact, Americans today could take lessons from Frank Gorshin’s clear, crisp speech and diction outside of such character roles and that we heard in his many guest appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Sunday night television in the 1960s.

“Better Speech Week” in America today is of course unimaginable.

At View from the Right, Lawrence Auster often expressed his insistence on the proper use of words and grammar, and he was right.

What should we do about people who degrade one of the greatest things we possess — the English language? What to do about people who avoid plain English and prefer carelessness, bombast, slang, pretentiousness, or the “ready-made phrases” that George Orwell so rightly decried in his timeless 1946 essay “Politics and The English Language?”

What to do about the vulgarians? About the cliché-carriers? About the “you guys” faction? The “you need to” crowd? The hopeless “hopefully” parrots? The infinitive splitters? The “more importantly” crowd? The pretentious, polysyllabic, psycho-prefixed pomposity preachers? The witless dependence on “really,” “just,” “basically,” “icon,” “cool,” and “awesome?” Subtract those and four or five other words from their working (but undernourished) vocabulary and most Americans would be left speechless. Oh, what a glorious prospect!

Perhaps they should be gagged for six months and thus rendered unable to inflict their stupidities on everyone around them. That would not prevent them from “communicating” with each other by means of the trendy gadgets they cannot live without. (One of the funniest examples is watching people walk through parks or along hiking trails while gazing at their little screens.)

And then there is the large and expanding tribe of Like Likers … the gigglers, airheads, and feminoids for whom nothing ever is but everything is “like.” I try with militant determination to avoid them, but they are everywhere and forever telling us that “I was like…,” “He was like…,” “She was like…,” “They were like…,” “We were like…,” “It was like…”

People living in backwoods rural areas in the 1930s could speak more sensibly.

Please follow and like us: