A Proposal: Caucus of the Militant Grammarians
Does the ongoing abuse of the English language give you the howling Fantods? Do you cringe at every split infinitive, dangling participle, or ignorance of subjunctive which your red pen must strike out? Do you ponder whether this century will see the end of the rich linguistic heritage that brought us Beowulf, Shakespeare, and Milton? Do you actively prepare for the horrifying day when USA Today prints its daily news in speech bubbles? You are not alone in your disgust with the lingua franca of today. Text messaging will not kill prose. Smilies will not devolve our shared tongue into crude pictographs. We shall not regress into to digitized cuneiform. Written language is complex, inscrutable, and only properly scribed in long-hand. The robots will not take that from us. Do you seek a forum to argue about serial commas? Do you wonder whether the Germans' Rechtschreibung could be effected in the Anglophone world? Do you seek other people who even know the word "Anglophone?" If you routinely find yourself at odds with the Microsoft Spellchecker, then this is your place. Language is not the dominion of software engineers, nor of marketroids. We know better, and we know how to wield the Queen's English in a way that would make your highschool teacher blush. Language is power. and it is high time to reclaim the language which we were taught. We need no inverted slang as with the Parisians, just an intelligent spoken jargon that gets the message across to those who desire to be informed. Will you help us explore these linguistic boundaries? Your response is encouraged.