When schools give up teaching literacy --

What can we do but stutter and stammer

faced with the overthrow of grammar?

The ivory tower, once well-gated,

is stormed by speech un-articulated,

and Stations of the Cross-out by editor's pen

may never be seen on a page again.

To decipher a sentence is an exercise gnostic

when meaning's as cryptic as initials acrostic.

Antonyms and acronyms make poor kin and kith

and prepositions know not when they're at, to or with.

Ironically, "texting" is the graveyard of text,

while literary stylists ask: what will die next?

The Pandemic of Logo-phobia

Is logo-phobia yet another new mental illness? Fearing, perhaps, to offend "persons of colour", are we becoming persons of colourless speech?

We fear words themselves -- pronouns, obviously -- but why are we anti-noun? We hate them so much we turn them into verbs -- always "efforting" and "expensing", "authoring" and "evidencing" -- even though misuse of the suffix "ing" does not a verb make. 

And who knew how malevolent a lowly preposition could be? Ask someone "where are you from?" and you could be labelled a right-wing anti-immigrant bigot. A polite conversational enquiry is attacked by the Language Police.

Remember when parents advised kids to "ask others about themselves, don't just talk about yourself"? Who knows what's polite now -- what's proper etiquette? "Etiquette" comes from the French word for "ticket". No one knows what our ticket out of Language Jail might be; no wonder we fear words. They're unexploded bombs: choose the wrong one and you can be blasted right off your platform.

In fear of the Language Police we call everybody persons-experiencing-things, rather than persons being things, i.e. noun-things with names, like "addict" for instance, rather than a person-experiencing-addiction. A shop-lifter, presumably, is a person-experiencing-kleptomania (and may be called a person-experiencing-marginalization-and-underprivilege, by persons-acting-diverse-and-inclusive).

 

So am I un-empathetically linking language with moral responsibility? Yup. (Sorry.) So avoiding clear language means avoiding moral responsibility? (A non-correct question if ever there was one. Our apologies.) 

Nothing's your fault if your pronoun is "they/them" -- it's theirs. Maybe avoiding being the Subject and hiding behind Object-hood is a survival strategy, but this refusal to let the ball of responsibility and fluency land in your court is causing certain others to experience depression -- and mystification. Why do we fear words, and fear meaning what words mean? Do we fear giving offense, or are we simply persons-experiencing-mass-censorship?

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