When you post/reblog pithy little graphics or other things that bemoan others not using English words or grammar correctly, it makes me lose a lot more respect for you than anyone else. It makes me want to unfollow you.
On the best days, that kind of language policing and shaming is a little brother to the tone argument in which you don’t care if someone has said something true or important because you’re just there to tear it down any way you can by disapproving of the words, letters, and structure used and the failure of them to meet arbitrary standards.
Arbitrary standards which, I should add, usually reside with the most privileged groups to set. Don’t believe me? Go look up the MLA (Modern Language Association) sometime and see how many rules of grammar and usage they’ve elected to change over the years. With them? Overnight what was correct before becomes incorrect and vice versa. Any group that can decide stylistic rules for millions without ever talking to those millions can fuck right off.
Or go look up how many words have entered and left “the dictionary” because a handful of privileged people have the power to make something a “real word” just by wielding such tools.
I’m going to make this simple. English as a language is not this perfect, beautiful, logical thing that must be preserved and protected from the dirty, filthy hands of people who won’t use it “correctly”. It isn’t even something that is actually all that streamlined.
English is a tongue that’s been forced on millions of people around this globe either at the direct end of a colonizer’s weapon or by circumstance which makes English the language people have to speak in order to get better social and economic opportunities.
How about you start with the ways in which Native languages here in the U.S. and in Canada were forcibly ripped from people through extermination and rounding up Native children and sticking them in hellish boarding schools until they spoke it just like white people thought it should be spoken. Then you can move on to other places in the world, (including the British isles, where languages like Gaelic declined greatly under English occupation in the seventeenth century and onwards) and see that English has often been a way for colonizers to have a stranglehold on the very method on which the colonized communicate with themselves, each other, and the world.
Part of these groups recovering, rebuilding, and empowering themselves is being able to use the English language however they want, in the way that best suits them.
If someone breaks into your home, beats up or kills your family, steals your treasures, smashes the rest and kidnaps you and then happens to give you their language along the way? You don’t owe them shit. You certainly don’t owe the native speakers of your assailant’s tongue a damn fucking thing when they’re running around benefitting big time from the suffering of you and yours.
Nor is language something that is automatic or universally easy to use in the standard way for all people. More than a few disabilities or conditions mean that the standard use of English is either exhausting and difficult or damn near impossible for the person writing, speaking, or communicating with it. It doesn’t mean that what such people have to communicate is worthless because while trying to tell their stories or communicate they substituted “your” for “you’re”.
See again the: you don’t owe anyone shit rule. You don’t owe a society that decides you’re subhuman based on bullshit criteria and wants to silence you anything. You don’t owe them a perfect presentation of your thoughts and ideas.
I mean, really, do you have any idea how arrogant, officious, petty, and utterly soulless you come off as when you start waggling your English teacher finger at someone for such things?
It doesn’t make you sound smart, it makes you sound snooty and spiteful. It makes it clear that you’re not interested in communication or actually understanding what anyone has to say. Complaining about improper grammar usage, especially in very informal settings, makes it clear that you’re interested in asserting privilege and dominance, in setting yourself up as some kind of authority who has the right to hand down condemnation and censure if someone comma splices a sentence.
So when you go around shaming people who do not use the English language the way you (especially if you are a white middle-to-upper class first language English speaker) think it should be spoken, you’re basically just spewing everything from classism to racism to imperialism/colonialism, and ableism. And you’re thinking that you’re superior because you’ve been privileged with the education, upbringing, and sheer LUCK to be able to easily use the English language in the standard fashion.
And if the “there”/”their” issue is more important than all that to you? Then you’re the problem here.
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Just putting Tumblr on notice
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