Copyright © 2008 by Ethan A. Winning
As I watch the news and now more frequently see in newsprint, it's impossible to get through a day when I don't hear someone murdering the king's English (a phrase probably foreign to those under 30). In fact, I'm beginning to think that the ability to communicate is in itself foreign to those under 30, and the only saving grace is that all those in the same generation probably understand each other because that's their education.
What the hell am I talking about? Well, I'll tell you. We don't expect our athletes - even those from schools like Stanford and NYU and others known for academics - to be able to put two sentences together without some grammatical error(s), but now ex-jocks who are commentators are telling us that "that was one of the funnest game I've ever witnessed!" (CNN July 27) If you're asking what's wrong with that, then you might as well skip the rest of this post.
There are those who have said that football, basketball, and baseball ought to be college majors, in part just to get around the controversy about athletic scholarships. I suppose a minor would be in Locker Room "Language so that, should retired proballers become managers, they can communicate with their players. Even without tongue in cheek, I might go along with this concept if there is balance, i.e., more money for what we used to call "shop" which would include auto mechanics, metal work, electrical work, and add plumbing. We need those skills in society more so than football and baseball though I could do a day without a car so long as the baseball game is televised.
Okay, I don't expect players and sports managers to speak "proper" English though I want you to know that I heard a speech by recently naturalized Ozzie Guillén and he spoke better than most of his players. What I do or did expect was that the folks at WGN in Chicago or CNN or even Fox to be able to put together a thought and speak properly. On CNN reporter said that he and his co-anchor had separately reported on an Obama speech and he started his sentence with, "Him and I were at the stadium just as Barack had his audience in awe."
That's not as common as the myriad of commentators who do not work for PBS or who have not actually written a book by themselves (or read one) who can't figure out that it's "you and I" not "you and me." It's he and I, not him and me. Take the second person out and ask yourself, how would you phrase the sentence, e.g., He went to the game, not him went to the game. So he and and I went.
When you speak incorrectly - whether accepted on the street or not - there are those who will stop listening, and once they stop listening, there goes your audience. Around my house and my kids' homes, no matter what the occasion, when a mistake is heard, there's a collective "I" spoken, glances exchanged, and they maybe we'll get back to the program.
We may expect this from President Bush - one child who should have been left behind - but not from a Greenspan, Jan Crawford Greenburg, Jack Welch, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and even the presidents of companies who were geeks and who dropped out of college. And they learned how to communicate very well because, when they needed funding, they had to ask those who spoke and wrote properly. I would imagine that even today one has to write a proposal before a bank throws money at you.
In an editorial written almost 15 years ago and still on this site, I wrote that "email will ruin all written communications." Add the validity of that statement to the prevalence of text messaging, and one gets the feeling that no one knows how to write a complete sentence, or spell, or be grammatically correct today.
This morning, I visited one of the less geeky tech Web sites, and in one article, I found the following:
"Actually when windows can't open a file by his own it ask you if you want to search online." (I didn't know that windows was a person and of the male persuasion to boot.)
"I had forgotten about some of these. I do agree on them all."
"I think the week xD card is the blame." (A twofer.)
I can hear you saying that I understood what they were getting at, so what's the big deal? Well, as managers age and get past 40 or 50, they are as distracted by improper use of the language as us really old folk (yes, us, not we). If you cannot get your point across because the person you're communicating with has stopped listening, finding a job is going to be tougher in this very tough job market.
As Career-Advice of Monster.com states, "Business documents rife with typos can undermine your professional reputation, not to mention that of your company." And that's just typos. If you're not Yogi Berra, imagine the impact one "ain't" can do during an interview.
Just remember that even a lie sounds better if put properly. So when asked how much you make in your current job, the answer is never "Them guys pays me 200 Gs." The Sopranos was fiction and George Raft has been dead since 1980.