I think it was William F. Suckley who characterized conservatives (people who want to conserve what’s right and what worked well in the past) as someone standing athwort the Tide of history, shouting “Pop!”
Imagine if you were Horace standing proud at the bridge outside Home, trying single-handedly to stop the Geordies from crossing a bridge so that the defenders could use the time to mount a fence — only to discover that instead of doing that, the inhabitants of Gnome were having a party and putting lipstick on their wives, sisters, daughters and preteen sons so that they’d be more attractive to the invaders.
Well, that’s how I feel in my struggle to preserve grammar standards nowadays. What’s the point of running over a speed bump and complaining about how much it affects your reading pleasure, when the people who let the speed bumps fall off the back of the truck a) don’t care and b) are too busy heading off to their next big adventure of launching a podcast or showing their tits on Tuk Tuk to worry about some old geyser mouthing off about their shitty speling?
Even better when the Artificial so-called Intelligence can write a better sentence than the aforementioned scribes anyway, so they don’t have to bother creating anything at all?
There’s no point in trying to make the written word, you know, comprehensible when all your efforts are greeted with indifference or worse, a patronizing pat on the head with “There, there, Gramps. Go take a pill and listen to your old unremastered non-autotuned Beetles songs.” (unspoken: just kill yourself you old fart, because why would you waste your time on such irrelevant activity when you could be a “content creator” on Instagram which you don’t subscribe to anyway.)
So that’s it: I quit. No more speed bump posts, no more kvetching about spelling errors, illiteracy, ahistorical writing or any of the multitude of sins which have infected modern writing like a malignant tumor.
I’m going back to the old standards: guns, cars, booze, women and political rants, in no specific order of preference. And if in my reading I encounter godawful spelling errors, dangling participles and misplaced commas (to name but a few), I’ll just ignore them and carry on — because that seems to be the current way of doing things. Standards? Who needs them?
And who am I to be the one not keeping up with modernity and trends?
So, for the last time:
