The internal battle royale between responsible parenting and my principled position that English is drunk

One of my favorite dichotomies of “life as a parent” is when a toddler drops a cookie or something on the ground and goes to choose it up and eat it. As a parent, it’s my job to maintain them from eating it off the ground due to germs. Also, yuck. My internal dialogue is, “I’m telling him no, but I’d eat it because of the five-second rule,” especially if we’re at home; not in public.

This whole struggle is how I feel about raising my children with English. I actually have long been certainly one of those individuals who thinks that English, and language basically, is incredibly fluid, and in relation to effective communication, many rules aren’t only unnecessary but additionally misleading, since most individuals can probably tell the difference between following certain rules and not following them.

For example, I imagine in commas, but I hate commas. oxford comma. Some people love them, though. But the actual fact that there are two sides to this debate means that nobody should lose points on a paper or test or be penalized for using or not using a comma before a conjunction in a listing of three or more things. For example, I find Oxford commas annoying, silly, and anti-Black. I do not use Oxford commas. I’ve had editors get upset after they don’t see them. Why can either be correct?

I hate that the word “conversate” is denigrated. While the word has already been entered into the dictionarymany individuals think its use is an indication of a person’s lesser education. That’s complete nonsense to me, especially when imperfect humans are those who got here up with the foundations in the primary place. Basically, most of our formal language makes it look like some governing body has accepted a person’s version of events, and then the remainder of us have to just accept and follow those rules. Or until someone changes them. And that’s true in all languages, remember. The only reason a door is called a door is because the one who called it didn’t call it a foot. Let that sink in. We can walk around doors and open them with feet. Or feet. Why are a couple of foot called feet? But if I actually have a couple of shoe, I actually have… shoes… not beets. Again, drunk. (For the record, I really like and use the word “feet” to explain a couple of foot.)

Lifestyle

This feud with language is fun for me because I’m a author and I can play with form and function on a regular basis, and it’s hard to argue with that because the alternatives I make are intentional. Ultimately, I really like that I can play with words in that way. I’m an artist. I make artistic things. Art may be used to advance ideas, so I’m really a revolutionary. I talk while others talk, and yet we’re all doing the identical thing. Words are fun. Usually, this feud doesn’t cause much of a stir. Mine is a private crusade, and while it’s fun to have conversations, there’s rarely any stakes involved.

And then people like me grow to be parents, which forces me to decide on between a crusade and ensuring my kids don’t get failing grades on their essays or English assignments because “my dad thinks English was drinking shots of Jameson all night and is dead drunk!”

I recently bumped into the identical problem when my son was visiting a friend. We picked him up and asked him what he ate while he was there and he said he had a “saLmon sandwich”. He pronounced the “L” since it’s THERE within the word and he knows find out how to spell it. My wife corrected him and said you don’t pronounce the “L” and I silently seethed because truthfully, I believe it’s silly to not pronounce the letters. I actively pronounce the letters that are there. To me, that’s p-neumonia. If we’re going to call it neumonia, let’s just drop the “p”. I don’t care if the word is Greek or Latin. It’s 2024, fix it. It’ll be tremendous.

I realize that much of recent English… irregularities… are the results of the blending and merging of countless languages ​​- it is a matter of evolution. With that in mind, evolution should proceed in a way that is smart, which suggests returning to old means and leaving some room to maneuver. But alas, I’m just a person in love with a language that doesn’t reciprocate my feelings.

Why something happened and the work I’m doing now haven’t got to be connected anymore. Now you would possibly ask, “P, how do you pronounce Ptolemy’s name?” And I might pronounce it the way in which he told me to, because despite the fact that I believe the spelling is suspect, I come from a creative tribe of black individuals who spell things in other ways that don’t necessarily align with how you’ll actually pronounce something phonetically. I actually have to just accept proper names, and I’m not anti-black creativity. We all have our stuff, people.

Anyway, you have got no idea how hard it was for me to not indicate to my son that if he desired to say “L,” he could say “L.” But the underside line is, I used to be at a restaurant recently and the owner said “L” and I didn’t think she was being sarcastic. While I wasn’t being judgmental, I wondered if she knew that wasn’t the way it was pronounced. See how contradictory that is? I’ll all the time say it, but I’ll do it brashly, but people might wonder about me the way in which I wondered concerning the owner. That’s the conundrum; I would like to ensure that my son knows how society works—he must learn the foundations so he can work out which of them he feels most comfortable breaking, so he can defend himself fairly and be okay together with his decisions. Until then, I would like to ensure that nobody has a reason to make fun of him or judge his education, or worse, his upbringing. I am unable to let people have a look at me, my father the author, with a crooked eye because my son dies on the Salmon Hill “L” station.

Although I would love to shout from the mountaintops that if the word “knife” has a “K” in it, it is a kuh-nife knife (shouting to Kat Williams (who understands my struggles) I actually have to do that thoughtfully so my kids don’t go to high school screaming about kuh-nifes and then we find yourself in a parent-teacher conference where I actually have to inform the teachers that what they’re teaching is silly, but most significantly, it’s anti-reading and I risk offending someone. Then my child has to suffer for my rules before they will form their very own.

Le sigh. When my children are sufficiently old, there will probably be an unlearning. I’ll give my children the chance to think concerning the language we speak, how we use it, and why we won’t make decisions because another person has already done it. Words and communication will all the time be fluid for me, and for that reason, English will all the time be drunk.