The internal battle royale between responsible parenting and my principled stance that the English language is drunk
OPINION: As my kids get older, my beef with the English language often forces me to decide between handing down my gripes and making sure my kids know the rules.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
One of my favorite “life as a parent” dichotomies is when a toddler drops a cookie, or something, on the floor and goes to pick it up and eat it. As a parent, it is my job to stop him from eating off of the floor because of the germs. Also, yech. In my head is the internal dialogue: “I’m telling him no, but I would eat that thing because of the five-second rule,” especially if we’re at home; this does not apply to public places.
That entire battle is how I feel about parenting my children with the English language. I’ve long been one of those people who feels like English, and language in general, is extremely fluid, and if the point is effective communication, then a lot of the rules are not only unnecessary but confusing since most people can probably discern what’s happening whether adhering to certain rules or not.
For instance, I do believe in commas; I hate the Oxford comma. Some people, though, love them. But the fact that there are two sides to this debate means that nobody should lose points on a paper or a test or be docked at any point for using, or not using, a comma before a conjunction in a list of three or more things. Like, I think Oxford commas are annoying, stupid and anti-Black. I don’t use Oxford commas. I have had editors who get annoyed when they don’t see them. Why can both ways be right?
I hate that the word “conversate” is maligned. While the word is now entered in the dictionary, many people view its use as a sign of an individual’s lesser education. That’s pure bollocks to me, especially when imperfect people are the ones who made up the rules in the first place. Essentially most of our formal language feels like some governing body accepted an individual’s version of events and then the rest of us are required to accept such rules and abide by them. Or until somebody changes them. And that’s across all languages, mind you. The only reason a door is called a door is because the person who named it didn’t call it a foot. Let that sink in. We could be walking on doors and opening foots. Or feet. Why is more than one foot called feet? But if I have more than one boot, I have… boots … not beet. Again, drunk. (For the record, I love and use the words “foots” to describe more than one foot.)
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This beef with language is fun for me because I’m a writer, and I get to play with form and function all the time, and it’s hard to argue because the choices I make are intentional. Ultimately, I love that I can play with words like this. I’m an artist. I art things. Art can be used to push ideas further so really I’m a revolutionary. I conversate while others converse and yet we’re all doing the exact same thing. Words are fun. Usually, this beef doesn’t cause much consternation. Mine is a personal crusade and while it’s fun to have the conversations, it is rare that there are stakes involved.
And then people like me become parents, which requires me to decide between crusades and ensuring my children don’t get Fs on essays or English assignments because “my dad thinks English has been taking shots of Jameson all night and is two sheets to the wind!”
I was presented with this very issue recently when my son went to visit a friend. We picked him up and asked him what he ate while he was there, and he said he had a “saLmon sandwich.” He pronounced the “L” because it’s RIGHT THERE in the word, one he knows how to spell. My wife corrected him and told him that you don’t pronounce the “L,” and I silently stewed because frankly, I think it’s stupid to not pronounce letters. I actively pronounce the letters that are there. To me, it’s p-neumonia. If we’re going to call it neumonia, just drop the “p.” I don’t care if the word is derived from Greek or Latin. It’s 2024, fix it. We’ll be OK.
I realize much of the modern version of the English language’s … irregularities … is due to the mixing and meshing of myriad languages — it’s an evolutionary thing. With that said, that evolution should be in a way that makes sense, which means revisiting old means and allowing some wiggle room. But alas, I’m just a man, in love with a language that doesn’t love me back.
Why a thing did happen and the work it is doing now doesn’t have to be connected anymore. Now, you might ask, “P, how would you pronounce Ptolemy’s name?” And I would pronounce it like he told me to because while I think the spelling is suspicious, I’m from a creative tribe of Black people who spell things all kinds of ways that don’t necessarily align with how you might actually pronounce something phonetically. Proper nouns I must accept, and I’m not anti-Black creativity. We all have our things, people.
Anyway, you have no idea how hard it was for me not to point out to my son that if he wants to say the “L” he can say the “L.” But here’s the rub, I was out at a restaurant recently, and the owner pronounced the “L” and I didn’t think she was doing it ironically. While I didn’t judge, I did wonder if she knew that you don’t pronounce it. You see how conflicting this is? I will always say it, but will do so defiantly, but people might wonder about me as I wondered about the owner. Therein lies the conundrum; I must make sure that my son knows how society operates — he must learn the rules so that he may learn which ones he feels most comfortable breaking so that he can righteously defend and be OK with his choices. Until then I must make sure nobody has a reason to laugh at him or judge his education, or worse, his upbringing. I can’t have people looking at me, his writer father, with a side-eye because my son is dying on the “L” in salmon hill.
As much as I want to scream from the mountaintops that if there’s a K in knife, then it is a kuh-nife (shouts out to Katt Williams who understands my struggle), I must do so discriminately so my children don’t go to school yelling about kuh-nifes and then we end up in a parent-teacher conference where I have to tell teachers that what they are teaching is stupid, but most importantly anti-reading, and risk offending somebody. Then my kid has to suffer for my principles before he’s had a chance to form principles of his own.
Le sigh. Once my kids are old enough, though, there will be some unlearning going on. I will give my kids the opportunity to think through the language we speak and how it’s used and why we don’t get to make choices because somebody else already did. Words and communication will always be fluid to me and because of that, English will always be drunk.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
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