Approaching Equinox, English Speaker Peeves

Autumnal equinox is arriving today: when number of daylight hours will balance out with the number of night time hours. As always, it seems to be a natural time of the year for me to pensively re-evaluate what sorts of progressions throughout the course of it are working out, and which ones are not, with equal attention. My big personal, bringing-things-to-balance, project for this weekend is re-organizing my home office. The task is so daunting that I decided to procrastinate a little by writing a blog entry instead.

I reviewed the goal list I made for myself from back in July. I accomplished most of those things, with the exception of achieving a full marathon distance run. I'm reminded of this because the Rush concert is in town next Friday. It was the reward I promised myself if I achieved this goal. The injury messed up my training schedule so badly.

My running activity is becoming more and more infrequent and abbreviated, mostly due to the fact that the city has turned off all the fountains along the trails since the month began, so my range is limited to going as far as the amount of water I can carry with me will allow me to. I feel about 90% healed now; it still hurts to touch my toes. My training sessions ordinarily are done in the morning, but I'll be switching over to using my free afternoons, or early evenings instead. My count is 451 runs that are registered with Nike Plus since I began recording them. I made it a goal to complete 500 before the end of the year. I'm curious as to how far toward the end of the year it will be until I'd find it intolerable to wear running shorts outside. Biking season will be winding down within the next one to two months as well, unless we are lucky enough to have a freakishly late-coming winter like we did last year. I'm not a winter cyclist. It's risky enough that I bike home from work in pitch dark, never mind adding icy streets to skid on in the middle of traffic into the mix. This new bike is great: my best purchase of the year so far, and it pleases me even more knowing that it has been paid off already within five months of riding it with the savings from my gasoline bill.

I've been doing more crazy experiments in self-sufficiency, and had another successful and delicious exercise in frugality for this week: Watermelon Rind Pickles. I purchased one of the last well-ripened watermelons at my local store for $1.98, and made six pint jars of worth of sweet and savory pickles out of the rinds, which would have ordinarily been destined for the garbage. Adding another dollar and a half worth of vinegar, sugar, spices, and sealing lids, reusing the jars I already have, and I made them for about 58 cents a pint. I couldn't make cucumber pickles that cheaply, even if I grew them from seed: if I ever somehow found enough growing space for them on my deck.

Recently, I applied to a casual ESL teaching position at one of the community centres. I was reminiscing about my last English teaching experience, and factoring in who my students would be if I'm hired, and thinking about how I'd do things differently this time around. I'm reasonably forgiving and patient with people who are just learning the language, but I'm also easily sickened when it comes listening to some people who allegedly have spoken this language all their lives, and who still speak it very poorly. Here are some (unfortunately all too common) ways that "English speakers" abuse the language that make me want to cast some biting ridicule at them for being so linguistically stupid:

1. Using the first person object pronoun in the nominative case: I really hate it when people say "Me and <blank> {verb} {predicate}.". Our built-in moron detectors would quickly signal alert status red when we hear fellow anglophones around us say things like, "Us will go to the store.", "Her went to the bathroom.",or "Them have tickets to the movies." So, why is it so bloody hard for some people to understand that "Me and Joe Blow are eating cookies" is just as totally stupid and wrong? Use 'Joe Blow and I', or simply 'We', instead. Hearing some adults constantly speaking this way makes me suspect that they flunked grade six grammar, perhaps more than just once.
2. Failing to notice the difference of usage between 'there', 'their', and 'they're' in their written forms: when people dare argue with me in writing, stating that, "Their is nothing wrong with my message because the spell checker on my computer says that they're are no mistakes. So their!" I'm very certain that I won't be hiring this person for anything very detail oriented. Similar peeves bug me too which relate to the incorrect usage of 'your' and 'you're', 'it's' and 'its', and 'to', 'two', and 'too'.
3. Improper verbal conjugations: English verbs only have two variations of present tense conjugations (the exception is three for the verb "to be": am, are, is), a simple addition of a single form of modal verb to the infinitive to make conditional or future tenses, a single past tense form (two for the verb "to be": was, were), a single participle form, and a single gerund form. It's so much simpler to learn verbs in English than it is to learn the verbs from most other languages*, and yet people are still so stupid to say things like, "I gots really good grammar", or "My child write like Shakespeare". Such things strike me as straddling the line between being grossly comical, and horrifically ignorant and tragic.
4. The word "like", or excessive profanity, splattered liberally and repeatedly throughout the body of a single sentence, stated as mindlessly and casually as if one were chewing gum: e.g. "I was like, going to the mall to like buy these cute shoes, and they were like a hundred dollars, but I only had like forty, so like I phoned my mom and said like, "I really like these shoes mom". . . Jesus Christ kid, SHUT UP! Six likes and only one was valid. On the same token, the substitution of the word "like" with the more foul word "fucking", or any other profanity, used as a filler with the same degree of frequency and thoughtlessness, is even more bothersome to me. Psychologically, people who do this constantly just to throw in this extra shock value, do so because they are they are insecure and yet childishly attention seeking (as with teenagers), and they lack the maturity and/or confidence to dare themselves to think that they might have or develop some other amiable intellectual aspect or personality dimension for themselves that can be used to maintain rapport with another person. If you are 'like' this still as a full grown adult, do the rest of us a favour, and actively learn to broaden your vocabulary, read about some topical interests, and tame your attitude with some civil and mannerly speech, or else just shut up. I'd rather listen to a troop of jabbering monkeys than to people such as these.

I fully realize that my own writing is festered with errors, and in need of frequent proofreading and editing. I also acknowledge that speech wise I've found myself doing the aforementioned peeves and mistakes before, but mostly because people aren't tuning into what I'm trying to say in my normal manner of speaking, and as much as it makes me cringe to do it, sometimes I have to compromise and lower myself to using their parlance to snap some sense into them. I like the statement, "Language is the means through which our thoughts are served to others." Sadly, I believe more and more people are becoming estranged from this idea. If the spoken and written thoughts I serve were food, I'd like it to be a banquet of things that have a simple and whimsical; yet elegant presentation, that are easy to digest; yet stun the senses in a good way, with familiar flavours made exotic with unique signature twists, even when the morsel tested is slightly sour or bitter. I would hope it would draw the diner (listener) into a realm that they've never before experienced. I'd rather not be caught verbally exposing and delivering my thought process in the same manner as doling out the gustatory equivalent of the slop that they serve in a prison chow line.

* - Count yourself lucky if English is your mother tongue, and you're using verbs. Languages like French, Russian, and Spanish have as many as six, present tense conjugation forms. Due to it's gender subdivided singular and plural person forms, Arabic has even more than that. This is why I shake my head in shame at people, whose first language is 'English', who can't even figure out which one of two given forms to use correctly.