Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-09-14 - 7:02 a.m.

Grammar Bicth

(I unearthed this rant yesterday - it was written in June. I remembered it after Older Daughter and I tried to look up one of her new teachers in her yearbook faculty pages, and discovered the book HAS no faculty pages. The expensive hardbound thick yearbook that I shelled out for, where each student on staff got a two-page spread to turn into anything they wanted - mostly crap and pictures of their friends - the book that is made up of at least one third autograph pages, for God's sake - has no faculty pages at all. And I got pissed off all over again.)

Yearbooks arrived yesterday. Kids are thrilled. Mom isn't.

I wish I'd saved my yearbooks. I didn't. Somewhere in there I made a clean dramatic break with my past, and swept them out with all my old emotional baggage, clearing the decks for a new and healthy life. Or more likely, I just threw away the wrong box.

But if I had them, I am quite sure that they would look nothing like my older daughter's middle school yearbook. We may have had a typo or two (yes, I was on the staff) but not page after page of glaring grammar gaffes, abused apostrophes, major misspellings.

I grow old, I grow old; I shall wear the bottom of my elastic-waist drawstring denim capris rolled. And thump my cane and harangue anyone who will listen (are you still listening?) about the sorry state of the school system and what the hell happened to literacy - I swear, what are the young people coming to these days?

I have this fear that they actually HAD a faculty advisor on this one. Could it be? Could we have decided that to force the children to adhere to archaic rules of language usage would injure their budding self-esteem? Crush their tender creative selves? That is was more nurturing to allow them free rein with the word processors? Were the damn spell-checkers backordered this year?

I was entertaining the more comforting belief that they had subcontracted the entire yearbook project to the Sunny Hill Group Home and Skills of Daily Living Center as a charitable act, but my daughter instructed me to read the autographs she'd gotten. And one of them, from a classmate, was "Hey bicth wassup! Have an assume summer!"

Well, yearbooks are mementos, and so I suppose my daughter will want to look back and remember that all the young girls addressed each other as "bitch." But can't she find some friends that can spell it?

"Assume" I didn't get at all; had to have her explain to me that the word was pronounced "awesome." Oh. These are our students, our yearbook staff, our kids. "I can't spell that word either, Mom," my kid informed me. "Then don't use it," I snapped. I wanted that word back anyway; I don't think children are responsible enough to be allowed to play with it.

Am I literate? You bet your sweet ass I am. Does it always show in my writing? Hell, no. But I've EARNED that privilege. Hey, I overuse capital letters and pass it off as VOICE! I use words like "gazillion"! I know it's not a word and I use it anyway! I flaunt convention! But damnit, I know the conventions I flaunt.

Hand me my teeth, Elwood, I do believe there's a crusade waiting.

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