The English Language

As a nanny who is also a trained teacher, I know that children are learning language, even when we don't think they are. That is why I believe that it is crucial to provide children with the best, most appropriate and correct language as they grow up. Yesterday I posted a Facebook status, in all naivety, more for a laugh than anything else, but it drew quite a bit of attention within 5 minutes of me posting my opinion on the English language.

Has anyone seen the Gain commercial recently? Well if not, please take a look. Because the rest of this post will make more sense if you do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqtvVfa0VqI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

I don't know about you, but the first time I saw this commercial I cringed and thought, 'How could a national commercial, with (most likely) some well paid and good writers, make such a huge vocabulary mistake?' Maybe it's that I paid attention in school, or it's just the fact that I had some of the best English teachers out there, [shout out to Mrs. Varga, Mr. Kennedy, and Mrs. Schwartzle], but I hope that more people are better educated to know that 'gooder' is not a real word!

Now, I posted a statement addressing this and the other too-often-used word 'funner' on Facebook informing Americans (in a comedic way), that indeed these words are not real. Then, maybe a mistake maybe not, I posted one more controversial language mistake: asks. I stated that when pronounced as 'acts' or 'ax', which happens more often than not, the word has a different meaning than it should. It was this part of my statement that surprisingly received more attention, and negative attention at that. I was called racist and told that the mispronunciation of the word was actually part of the 'language' Ebonics. (I put the word language in a quotes because I do not believe that it has been officially named as a language, such as 'Pittsburghese').

It was not my intention to sound racist, for I am not. It was more my intention to write about how frustrated I was that we live in a society that is often so nit-picky about the silliest of things, but doesn't seem to mind the mistakes so often made in our mother tongue, especially when using it in media that is nationally, or globally, seen and heard. Because, as I first stated, children, from the earliest of ages, pick up on language, using it in what they believe is the correct way. So if a child continuously hears the word 'gooder' being used, rather than 'better', they might start to believe that that is the correct word, when it is in fact not.

Now I know many of you might be thinking that I am completely throwing this out of proportion, but there is reason behind my concern. My junior year of high school, in preparation for the state wide test, my English teacher handed out copies of previous years' English portion of the test. She asked us to read the prompt, the answers given by the students and then award each student the score we think they deserve based on the criteria given, as practice for when we would take the exam. There was one essay, or rather I should say short paragraph, that caught many of my classmates' attention and had many of us laughing, mostly in shock. An anonymous student (from the previous year from an anonymous PA school) had written '...an den I aks him wat he thinked...'. Besides the poor grammar and misspelling, it took some of my fellow classmates a few seconds to figure out what the student had meant to write:'...and then I asked him what he thought...' It got our class talking about what this meant for students who spoke one way with their friends and family, and then were expected to speak, or at least write, another way when it came to performing nationally.

We debated as to whether or not this student should be accountable for his extremely incorrect use of the English language, or if the teacher and school should be responsible for not correcting him and teaching him the proper spelling, pronunciation and grammar. We also discussed whether or not national and state tests should be reworded depending on the area in which it is given, due to slight changes in dialect. No real decision was made in my English class of 25 students, but I knew where I stood.

I do believe that people should be able to express themselves using whatever language or dialect they choose, but when it comes down to national and global usage, we should maintain one set American English language. Otherwise, I feel it would become too confusing if people started saying 'aks' with the intention of meaning 'asks', and so on.

So, to my readers, what are your thoughts on using correct vocabulary when speaking on a local, national and/or global level?