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You may have read of the death of Marie Smith Jones, the last native fluent speaker of Eyak, once used along the Copper River in south Alaska. The notice set me to wonder if perhaps the day is not far off when we will be informed of the demise of the last known defender of the King’s English.
When that day comes, we might read in the New York Times (by then undoubtedly a weekly) an obituary that reads something like this:
PIORIA, Ill. – Harvey “Picky” Stickler, the last stout defender of proper English usage, has died. Many will remember him as an inveterate writer of letters to the editors of many now defunct large daily newspapers, carping about misspellings and violations of arcane grammar rules. He had recently turned his attention toward the Internet and its blog writers, a task that caused his health to deteriorate rapidly. He was 92 and discouraged.
His daughter and lone survivor, Lucy, had been estranged from her father for several years. “He wasn’t nicknamed ‘Picky’ for nothing,” she said from her home in Boston. “When I lived with him he was always, like, well, you know, correcting me. After my daughter was born, her and I just moved out.”
the project method redux
It is common belief that the decline of the language is the fault of the facility of the computer. This is not true... proper English usage first began to slide long ago when educators replaced old-fashioned English courses (boring topics like parts of speech and punctuation) with courses called Language Arts.
I made this discovery one evening several years ago when I found my daughter, a student in secondary school, wrestling with our young Golden Retriever named Colby (for Colby College of course) on the kitchen floor. She explained she was making a Plaster of Paris cast of one of the dog’s paws. The kitchen was a mess. The dog was not amused. “What for?” I said. “For Language Arts,” she said.
Which reminds me. It's getting to be time for our second annual Worst School Project awards.
Taking entries now.
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