Friday, December 13, 2019

English: Love it or leave it. Apparently, we are leaving it.

Many writers on social media seem to have stopped using subjects in their sentences. Why? Here is an example:

"Not able to cover as much area as we wanted because it's so marshy/swampy up there. Possibly going up in the next couple weeks to rule out some more areas."

I believe we are already well on the way to forgetting how to use penmanship - how many young people use cursive after their school classes? - and if we keep this no-subject-used sentence structure, we will devolve as a species. The ability to use and evolve language is the one thing that really separates us from those species in the the lower Animal Kingdom and I am not sure we really want to evolve language as we seem to.
 
Already one of the most common - though I hesitate to use the word "popular" - subjects in a college freshman's curriculum is Remedial English. (That, of course, leads one to as what is being taught to students in pre-college school...but that is a topic we do not want to address lest we make young students feel less than Perfect In Every Way.)

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