"How funny is it..."

"...that the only skill we have that's worth a damn is that we speak the only language we know?" -Robert Cenzon

Indeed, for those who have excelled academically but struggled with direction and finding satisfaction with available work opportunities, teaching English in a foreign country seems to be a popular solution. Even if it's not an application of our most advanced level of education, we're still capable of doing this simply because we are native speakers, correct?

Well, after having taught English in France for 7 months, I found that the experience was certainly a challenging one- it was not unusual to find myself repeating phrases over and over as well as perusing online grammar sources in order to provide my friends or students with a correct answer. Moreover, as a result of the experience, I've begun to take note of grammar and vocabulary when people write and speak, and what I've discovered upon returning to the US is not pleasant. It is as if many of us have never had a class in grammar, read a book, or even listened to ourselves speak. Grammatical mistakes and misapplications of idiomatic phrases are everywhere. With the overabundance of news programming, there are many anchors who struggle to get the words out without severe hiccups. Watching athletic events can be extremely annoying, as pre-game hosts, broadcasters, coaches, and athletes are among the worst offenders. While I can tolerate the occasional mistake, I do find it frustrating to read a company's website and find multiple errors that can lead to ambiguity or misunderstandings, or hear a speaker on television making terrible gaffes in trying to spit out a simple phrase. This type of fault can damage credibility and, in the case of written publications, significantly reduce the readability of an article.

As a result, I began wondering why we're so poor at using our mother tongue. At first, I thought about myself. I am not perfect with written English, and certainly not in speaking. Perhaps I rely too heavily on spell-check. However, it appears that many people aren't even using that resource, so this is probably not the reason. After all, thinking back on reading the writings of fellow students in my first years of college, some of them were a struggle to understand because of the frequency of mistakes. Now, in reading blogs and posts on social networking sites, I've noticed that this is epidemic. No, I'm not talking about text-talk and condensations for the sake of being efficient, like "4," "u," etc, although these (and the accompanying errors in their use) have often rendered postings on sites like YouTube and Twitter nearly incomprehensible, and they certainly do not reflect well on our common intelligence.

While I am not absolutely sure (and I am open to hearing other suggestions on this subject), I think that the decline in our English is the result of:
1) the free-for-all, unmonitored nature of the internet;
2) the glorification of the "coolness" of speaking in an uneducated manner; and
3) a glaring shortcoming of our education system.

To focus on the topic of education, I noticed while I was in France that students are required to follow difficult grammar lessons, and they are exposed to this over a period of several years. For anyone not familiar with the language, French grammar can be difficult and very convoluted, and it is easily understandable why students need extensive training in the subject. As someone who has learned it for their second language, I am very cognizant of my faults and care a great deal about what is and isn't correct. However, the same could not be said for my English. Furthermore, when foreign friends would ask me for a sophisticated or intelligent manner of saying something in English, I found that I was often able to provide them a phrase in French, but not in English. Great. I speak a language with comparatively elementary conjugation rules and a significantly larger vocabulary base, and I struggle to develop intellectual phrases or even avoid errors. Thus, as I reflect on my education, it sticks out in my mind that we spent a surprisingly small amount of time covering grammar topics, although we did have years of vocabulary practice. I think that many people, with an honest self-evaluation, would be able to say the same regarding their education, and I think that this needs to change if we are going to maintain an intelligent society that is capable of clearly communicating.

As a result of this experience, I've begun to make a concerted effort to clean up my language, and I would like to encourage others to do likewise. I will admit that I have derived a great deal of pleasure over the years in speaking broken English and joking with my friends in that way. However, this type of language does not belong in a written forum, where the original context will likely be lost or misunderstood, and readers will be left to judge us as incoherent and uneducated. The only people laughing then will be the reader who finds it funny that we can't even speak the only language we know, and that's not what we want, is it?