The Awesomizer

Dear Awesomizer readers, this is a general chastisement to all of us in the good ol’ US of A about our understanding of our own language, and then a more general discussion of the implications of such ignorance. As some of you have seen from my short status update recently on Facebook, there is some (and shockingly common) misunderstanding of the proper usage of such words as “there,” “their,” and “they’re;” “your” and “you’re” — and then some wonderful ones added by a few others who have adopted the cause of the total, ballz-out Awesomization of America — like “two,” “too,” and “to”; and “here” and “hear.”

Many people who have learned English as a second (or third or fourth) language will tell you that it is because of these homonyms(phones)(graphs) that English is a tricky language to learn and use, and by virtue of my place of employment and my course of study, I can verify this to be true in many cases. However, and this is the crux of this discussion … these people who have learned English as a second (3rd, 4th, 5th) language USE THESE F%^*ING WORDS CORRECTLY while we, native-born, native speakers of English CANNOT and have no desire to correct this particular problem.

Meanwhile, there are intelligent, eloquent, hard-working people in our midst who not only know how to speak and write in English every bit as well as we do (or better), but they also speak and/or write fluently in several languages. How many people do you know who are bilingual, let alone are polyglots? How may people do you know who could use polyglot correctly in a sentence?

Lord knows I’m not multilingual … I know enough Spanish to order at Taco Bell and that’s about it.

This is not to say that I would expect all of us to become English experts or Linguists or anything, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that we can (and should) learn the bare-bones basics of the language we have supposedly learned since birth … and that’s “supposedly,” not “supposably.”

Part of this, I realize, is the sad fact that all people are not considered equal and that there is still a large part of our population that does not have access to quality education … hell, if we can’t provide the basics needed to keep our citizens healthy, then how are we going to provide them all with good education … but a lot of it is our own willful, intentional, acceptable, laudable ignorance.

It’s the jock mentality of high school … nerds do well in class, jocks do well in sports, it’s cooler to be a jock than a nerd, therefore, jocks are more valued. It’s why professional athletes make millions of dollars and teachers make $h!t.

The problem with all of this is — and here, dear readers, is the point of Awesomization — we are willing to blame everyone but ourselves for the problems we have in this country. It’s immigrants, it’s foreign business, it’s them damn Arabs, it’s the gays and the lesbians, it’s the non-Christians, it’s the liberal media, it’s blah, blah, blah.

Wake up people … if we can’t write the basics of our own language, how are we supposed to run the giant business that is our country? How are we supposed to keep foreign businesses from doing better than American businesses? How are we supposed to keep foreign individuals from, as the rednecks say, “taking our jobs,” if they are obviously willing to work harder and study harder than we are?

How, my fellow Americans, can we expose the corruption and broken systems in this country, so that we can be active participants in fixing the systems, eradicating the corruption, and mending the clusterF^&K of a country we live in, without being taken for a ride by the “greedy politicians” and the “liberal media” and all of the other people who are “doing stuff to us” if we can’t F%^&ING figure out that “there,” “their,” and “they’re” are three diifferent words?

Education is the key … if we would actually be willing to take it seriously … but that, my friends, is entirely too unAmerican.