By Wayne Dominowski, SBA Guest Commentary
(SB) – Not only is today’s media the purveyors of fake news, but they are also dumb, lazy-ass hacks when it comes to English grammar. They call themselves writers, a misnomer that borders on a felony. Spelling, punctuation (periods, question marks, exclamation points), hyphens, dashes, brackets, ellipses, apostrophes, (the use of quotation marks to indicate quotes, speech, and short works), commas, semicolons and colons, all of which can/cannot, should/shouldn’t be used in a complete sentence, is ancient history.
There are six sentence types: Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative, Exclamatory, Compound, and Complex. We once were required to diagram each.
My major -- way back in my baccalaureate/bachelor degree years -- was English; I minored in Journalism. In high school, I took two full years and two summers of Latin, which I now thank God for. (English, by the way, derives from Latin.) Latin taught me about English, and English in addition to reading the classics, taught me about writing, Anyone who did the same are now dead. I am the last of the Mohicans.
Real writing is hard work. Wrapping up a story, whether major, minor, long or short, is cranial. A thorough writer edits his work at least a half-dozen times, if not more, before submitting his article or story for publication. The garbage bin of major newspaper writers today, and yes, TV writers (by the way, on-air personalities do NOT write; they read), and radio writers, aren’t writers. Most use Artificial Intelligence, or GROK, or steal from one another.
They don’t use a Dictionary (both spelling and meaning of a word), or Thesaurus (a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms), much less, an Encyclopedia, or consult William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, Robert’s Rules of Writing, or over a hundred (at least) books on the Rules of Grammar, a World Atlas (so you know where you are and they are on the planet), or for journalists, The Associated Press Stylebook, etc. Going in-hand-in-hand with the latter… read, read, read works by American authors Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, Emily Dickinson, and more (or ask your local librarian… Yes, that’s where books are housed -- hundreds of them).
I’m getting a headache, and wondering why I am writing any of this. I don’t even know if anyone actually knows how to read anymore.
Case in point. Years ago, if a writer used an acronym (a word formed from the initial letters or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or series of words and pronounced as a separate word, as WAC from Women's Army Corps, OPEC from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or LORAN from long-range navigation) he/she spelled it out once, then used the acronym freely in the same article or story.
Here’s a sample of what the average reader faces every day:
POV = Point of View.
NIL = (Use to mean, NOTHING, as in ‘the other team was NIL in scoring’). Today’s meaning: Name, Image, Likeness – used in U.S. sports jargon.
DEA = Drug Enforcement Administration. (There are over 100 other meanings to this acronym: Don’t Even Ask, Division of Economic Analysis, Data Encryption Algorithm, Drunk Every Afternoon, Department of Elder Affairs, etc., etc.
NOLA = New Orleans Louisiana.
SNAFU = Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.
ROM = Read-Only Memory.
Yahoo!= Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle.
MADD = Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
DARE = Drug Abuse Resistance Education.
Guess what? Today’s journalists don’t even think of spelling out an acronym. I suspect they themselves don’t know what an acronym means, and frankly, to be honest, I don’t believe they even care to know.
So, what are we to do? Require them to look it up? Hahahahahahahaha. Are you kidding me? That means work and that’s the last thing any of them are willing to do.
I have no idea what the state of English is today in education. Is it even taught? Do you know? I don’t. There used to be a thing called General Education Requirements (GenEds) in college, in which English Composition, Math, Foreign Language, Natural Sciences, Health & Physical Education, Humanities, Arts, and Social Science, all of which, as I remember, were not walks in the park. I don’t know what they are like today. (Maybe everyone gets an A because we need your money to pay our salaries and keep our university running?)
Hell, writing in cursive has been trashed. It’s ancient history, except in Europe where they still write actual letters. (Even Russians write in cursive: (Russian: В нашей стране Путин настаивает на том, чтобы мы учились писать прописью. English: In our country, Putin insists we learn to write in cursive.)
I went into a store and handed a written list of items I needed. The guy handed it back to me and said, “I can’t read this.” He didn’t mean legibility, he meant cursive. He never learned it.
I was in a bank and the teller asked me to sign my name to a document. I did. She said, “You have beautiful handwriting. I wish I could do that.” I was afraid to ask her why she couldn’t.
Investigative reporting? What’s that? To get any sense of digging for the truth, we now rely in independent journalists like Nick Shirley, who on his own, revealed the shocking Somali billion-dollar fraud in Minnesota. There are others listed as Independent Journalists, but I can’t vouch for them because I only heard of one in the long listings found on my internet search.
All I can say is the absence of honest, researched-based, fact-based writing/reporting has been buried by a plethora of hack writers made all the worse for lack of journalistic integrity. We’ve surpassed mediocrity; its new designation is idiocy.
This commentary took me at least 14 hours to write, and in the process, I didn’t count how many times I went back to edit it. Was I satisfied with it after I called it a day and filed it for publication? Not really. As always, I leave critiques to the readers.
Old school.
