Dave Barry - Bad Habits

“GI Combat Death Killers,” featuring American soldiers with chin stubble who fought enemy Communist orientals with skin the color of school buses. These comic books had lots of new and exciting words:

“Commie attack! Hit the dirt!”

BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA

“Grenade! Grenade!”

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMKABOOOOOOM

“Joe! They got Joe! Eat lead, you reds!”

BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA

“Aieeeeeeeeeeee.”

And so on. This is how we developed our language skills. If we had stuck with Dick and Jane, we’d have sounded like morons.

After the first grade, our schoolbooks got longer, but they did not get more interesting. The history books were the worst. Take, for example, the Civil War. I think we can safely assume that the Civil War was fairly lively, but you would never know this from reading elementary school history books:

THE CIVIL WAR

“The Civil War was very serious. It was caused by slavery and states’ rights, and it resulted in the Gettysburg Address.

Discussion Questions: How serious was the Civil War? Would you feel nervous if you had to give the Gettysburg Address? Explain.”

The other big problem with history textbooks was that they always started at the dawn of Civilization and ended around 1948. So we’d spend the first three months of each school year reading about the ancient

SUMerians at a leisurely pace. Then the teacher would realize that time was running short, and we’d race through the rest of history, covering World War II in a matter of minutes, and getting to Harry Truman on the last day. Then the next year, we’d go back to the ancient Sumerians. After a few years of this, we began to see history as an endlessly repeating, incredibly dull cycle, starting with Sumerians and leading inexorably to Harry Truman, then going back again. No wonder so many of us turned to loud music and drugs.

Things were a little better in English class, because we didn’t have to read the same books over and over. On the other hand, we had to read

a lot of books nobody would want to read even once, such as The Last of the Mohicans, which was written by James Fenimore Cooper, although I seriously doubt that Cooper himself ever read it. We also read a batch of plays by Shakespeare, which are very entertaining when you watch actors perform them but are almost impossible to understand when you read them:

FLAVORUS: Forsooth ‘twixt consequence doest thou engage? Wouldst thou thine bodkin under thee enrage?

HORACLES: In faith I wouldst not e’er intent fulfill, For o’er petards a dullard’s loath to till.

(Shakespeare wrote this way because English was not his native language. He was Sumerian.)

Anyway, that’s why I think people don’t read books anymore. The sad thing is that there are many fine books around, just waiting to be read. You can see them on convenient display racks at any of the better supermarkets; they have titles like The Goodyear Blimp Diet and Evil Nazi War Criminals Get an Atomic Bomb and Threaten to Destroy Uruguay. These books are easy to read, and minutes after you read one you’re ready for another. What we need is some kind of federal program to get people interested in them. Maybe the President could read some of them aloud on national television (he is very good at reading aloud). Or maybe we could give people an additional tax exemption for every book report they attach to their income tax returns. Whatever we do, we should do it soon, to get people out of the habit of getting all their information from television and poorly researched newspaper columns.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: “Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America,” or “Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.”

The truth is that grammar is not the most important thing in the world. The Super Bowl is the most important thing in the world. But grammar is still important. For example, suppose you are being interviewed for a job as an airplane pilot, and your prospective employer asks you if you have any experience, and you answer: “Well, I ain’t never actually flied no actual airplanes or nothing, but I got several pilot-style hats and several friends who I like to talk about airplanes with.”

If you answer this way, the prospective employer will immediately realize that you have ended your sentence with a preposition. (What you should have said, of course, is “several friends with who I like to talk about airplanes.”) So you will not get the job, because airline pilots have to use good grammar when they get on the intercom and explain to the passengers that, because of high winds, the plane is going to take off several hours late and land in Pierre, South Dakota, instead of Los Angeles.

We did not always have grammar. In medieval England, people said whatever they wanted, without regard to rules, and as a result they sounded like morons. Take the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who Couldn’t even spell his first name right. He wrote a large poem called Canterbury Tales, in which people from various professions—knight, monk, miller, weever, riveter, steeler, diver, stevedore, spinnaker, etc.—and on and on and on like this:

In a somer sesun whon softe was the sunne

I kylled a youn e birde ande I ate it on a bun

When Chaucer’s poem was published, everybody read it and said: “My God, we need some grammar around here.” So they formed a Grammar Commission, which developed the parts of speech, the main ones being nouns, verbs, predicants, conjectures, particles, proverbs, adjoiners, coordinates, and rebuttals. Then the commission made up hundreds and hundreds of grammar rules, all of which were strictly enforced.

When the colonists came to America, they rebelled against British grammar. They openly used words like “ain’t” and “finalize,” and when they wrote the Declaration of Independence they deliberately misspelled many words. Thanks to their courage, today we Americans have only two rules of grammar:

Rule 1. The word “I’me” is always incorrect.

Most of us learn this rule as children, from our mothers. We say things like: “Mom, can Bobby and me roll the camping trailer over Mrs. Johnson’s cat?” And our mothers say: “Remember your grammar, dear. You mean: ‘Can Bobby and I roll the camping trailer over Mrs. Johnson’s cat?’ Of course you can, but be home by dinnertime.”

The only exception to this rule is in formal business writing, where instead of “I” you must use “the undersigned.” For example, this business letter is incorrect:

“Dear Hunky-Dory Canned Fruit Company:

A couple days ago my wife bought a can of your cling peaches and served them to my mother who has a weak heart and she damn near died when she bit into a live grub. If I ever find out where you live, I am gonna whomp you on the head with a ax handle.”

This should be corrected as follows:

“If the undersigned ever finds out where you live, the undersigned is gonna whomp you on the head with a ax handle.”

Rule 2. You’re not allowed to split infinitives.

An infinitive is the word “to” and whatever comes right behind it, such as “to a tee,” “to the best of my ability” ... “tomato,” etc. Splitting an infinitive is putting something between the “to” and the other words. For example, this is incorrect:

“Hey man, you got any, you know, spare change you could give to, like, me?”

The correct version is:

spare change you could, like, give to me?”

The advantage of American English is that, because there are so few rules, practically anybody can learn to speak it in just a few minutes. The disadvantage is that Americans generally sound like jerks, whereas the British sound really smart, especially to Americans. That’s why Americans are so fond of those British dramas they’re always showing on public television, the ones introduced by Alistair Cooke. Americans love people who talk like Alistair Cooke. He could introduce old episodes of