Greed & grammar

Two articles in today’s New York Times caught my attention. One was on the latest spending bill heading from Capitol Hill to the White House for the President’s signature. In the bill, like every one of these bills, there’s a pile of pork barrel spending. Among the projects is an allocation of $100,000 for the Punxsutawney (as in Pennsylvania, land of omniscient groundhogs) Weather Discovery Center.

So it’s not bad enough that we have to put up with this overgrown rat showing up to “predict” the weather once a year, but now we have to have our tax dollars spent on a museum dedicated to the only weather prediction method less reliable than the BS (not the college degree) they throw at us on the news every night? (Don’t get me started on the accuracy of the “five day” forecasts—a real pantload, if ever there was one!)

The icing on that cake? Phil, the aforementioned overgrown rat, is going (being taken, I would think, his driving in the movie Groundhog Day notwithstanding) to Washington, DC, for a news conference with Rep. John E. Peterson, Republican (PA), who plans to defend the grant.

So someone tell me again how Republicans are fiscal conservatives, please. Oh well, it’s not like we have a war to fight, terrorists to track down, children going to sleep hungry or an educational system that’s falling apart.

Oh, we do? Well, someone should tell the folks in DC. It seems to have escaped their attention.

Now, on to another fun tidbit from the Times. This is something that many of you have no doubt noticed. There is an article titled, “What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence,” wherein the Times examines special educational programs designed to help employees and managers learn to construct sentences in English!

Is this a small problem? I think we all know that it is not. In fact, according to the article, corporate America is spending “as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.” What a waste! Imagine if students actually learned the basics in school. How have things fallen into such disrepair in our educational institutions?

Certainly, spending money on groundhogs, instead of schools, doesn’t help, but I think a more fundamental change has made its way through our society. There’s a lack of respect for education (not to mention manners, but that’s worth an entirely separate post on another day) among many of the “parents” raising children today.

When my parents were growing up, they went to the New York City public schools. They learned to read and write, learned about history, learned basic mathematics, read the classics and received a solid educational footing on which to base their lives. The schools certainly are struggling more these days—and not just in New York City—but there’s a bigger problem. As a general rule, today’s kids aren’t held to the same standard as my parents (or even my contemporaries) were. Granted, there are exceptions, but the lack of basic literacy is appalling.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am an HR Director. In this job, I see many applicants who are doing their best to impress me. Well educated—or so their diplomas would suggest—men and women who present me with cover letters, resumes and writing samples that shouldn’t pass muster with an elementary school teacher.

According to the Times, the proliferation of e-mail as a primary means of communication has brought this problem to the fore. Quoting one educator, it says, “E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited.” I understand what he’s saying, but, if we are to examine the entire problem, we might also want to examine who is teaching English to many of today’s schoolchildren.

A teacher—a very smart one, as it happens, who is just shy of earning his doctorate—recently sent me a note, saying that he “felt badly” about communicating some news to a loved one.

Felt badly? Are active and passive verbs and their modifiers irrelevant these days? The phrase is “felt bad.” “Felt badly” would suggest that one’s sense of touch is damaged. For instance, if we were observing a man placing his hand on the surface of a solid oak table and saying, “this feels just like pudding,” then we might remark, “my, he feels badly, doesn’t he?”

On a related topic, must I forever endure first-person pronouns as the objects of verbs other than “to be”? “It is I” is about as far as “I” should be taken as an object. One more, “between you and I, blah, blah, blah,” and things are going to turn very unpretty around here! (Yes, I know “unpretty” isn’t a word. Allow me some Orwellian latitude, please. I’m ranting here!) :)

Okay, now I’m just getting agitated. Even so, this is basic. Lacking the fundamentals, how are we to excel as individuals and as a society? My use of our language is far from perfect, but that which I see around me every day truly fills me with despair!