Whatever became of coherent, articulate everyday speech? Judging from what’s heard on TV and talk radio–guests as well as hosts (who are paid to sound professional)– the nation is beset with a verbal disease epidemic best described as “dysfunctional discourse.” Symptoms include the following crutch expressions that surely must give speech instructors apoplexy: “I mean,” “like,” “sort of” and “you know.” None enhances communication. All distract.
And not just high school kids are at fault. Even some college instructors, doctors and lawyers mar their speech with the same sophomoric expressions.
Not counting “ain’t,” the most ubiquitous speech violations are “different than” where “different from” is called for, and the gratuitous redundancy “and also”–so much so that the foreign-born now mimic both expressions, mistaking them to be legitimate English.
Even journalists and advertising copywriters are not immune; it is painful watching them also regularly confusing “style” with “fashion,” “fertility” with “fecundity,” “will” with “shall” and “can” with “may,” thus confounding semantics and propagating misuse via bad example.
The latest, newest gaffe heard on radio and TV: using “presently,” which means soon, as if it means at present. It makes discerning people wonder: What have English teachers been doing to earn their pay the past 40 years? To let so much wrongful speech get by without purging it from students’ vocabularies did them a supreme disservice, and thereby deflated the value of any diploma or degree conferred.
How grateful we senior citizens ought to be for having had teachers who not only knew better but whose commitment to professionalism was adequate to purge us of such errors and inanities before passing or graduating us, or at least making us internalize the choices between right speech and wrong.
