An impeachable offense

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
An impeachable offense				January 12, 2008

Former presidential candidate George McGovern is looking for some action. At age 85 he figures that he’s owed a dose of heavy political drama. To that end he wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post in which he proposed that we impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney.

McGovern’s list of impeachable offenses is a long one, including lying to Congress, the dubious war in Iraq, the war against the Constitution, the war against justice, the war against privacy rights, the war against habeas corpus and the war against New Orleans.

While I couldn’t agree more, the fact is that McGovern has overlooked Bush’s most heinously impeachable offense: the war against the English language.

After eight years of Bushspeak, the country has become so linguistically bamboozled that, along with the dollar, the rules and regulations that formerly governed and protected our wannabe official language have become virtually worthless.

Yet, as Bush once correctly noted, “Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.”

Back in the enlightened Dark Ages, when teachers ruled their fiefdoms without the interposition of administrative bleats about autocracy, one whole year of high school English was devoted to English grammar.

Students parsed and diagrammed sentences until they actually knew the difference between a subject and an object. Until they knew what participial phrases and subordinate clauses were and where they should land in a sentence. Until they knew what predicate nominatives were and how to construct a relative clause. Until they knew the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. Indeed, until they knew that verbs had more than one tense and that the verb “to be” had more forms than “is.” They knew what the perfect and pluperfect tenses were and that some verbs actually had two voices. And they knew that adjectives and adverbs were not the same linguistic beast.

If they were lucky, they might even have gotten a penetrating discussion about whether or not there was a subjunctive mood in English.

But so lax and lumpish have our linguistic rules become that teachers ski quickly over that slippery slope and wave to parts of speech as they go by. There simply aren’t many rules to teach anymore, and what few are left fall into the “Why do we have to know that?” category.

Go into any English class at Jamestown or Lafayette High and look for diagrammed sentences on the blackboard or listen for a detailed explanation of the proper construction of contrary-to-fact conditions in English or the function of a gerund, and you’ll search in vain. Quite beyond the students, most English teachers have no idea what the rules for diagramming are or what aspects of a verb gerunds and supines represent.

These days, the only way to learn English grammar is to take Latin.

While Bush can cavalierly “hypothecate,” as he put it, that “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream,” the fact is that families are so electronically bombarded with grammarless badinage from TV and a host of ear-wired doodads that they have no idea what constitutes proper English expression.

Text messaging has blown the language to bits with its emoticons and shortcuts, and neither families nor teachers have any control over it. Reading has become a lost art and illiteracy a quality to be emulated. At one point Bush thought it an accomplishment worth noting when he confessed to a reporter that he actually read a book. He still thinks that his failure to read newspapers is meritorious.

In these days of twisted grammar, nouns become verbs and verbs nouns in a process called back formation. Even the Weather Channel has gotten into the act, as cold fronts “transition” from West to East. Why can’t they just move, or wander or plow on?

As for kids, they no longer write or send mail. They now “message” each other. “Message (or msg) me tomw.”

I sometimes wonder if these denominative verbs have all the regular principal parts. Can you say, “I have been messaged”? Or “They will have messaged him”? Or “This store will be transitioned to another location”? I suppose so.

Well, I say enough is enough.

I completely agree with Bush’s insistence that, “If you don’t stand for anything, you don’t stand for anything. If you don’t stand for something, you don’t stand for anything.”

Doesn’t that say it all?

As we begin a new year, we all need to back McGovern’s stand and hypothecate a plan to transition people like Bush and his fellow English manglers out of office. We must re-president so that we can re-language ourselves.

During the present General Assembly session, our xenophobic state legislators will debate a bill to make English the official language of Virginia. Whose English or what brand of English they’ll give their stamp of approval to, I have no idea. But certainly Bush would concur, as he did when he pronounced in 2003 that “One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end.”

Tlk2Ultr.