It’s true: the fastest way to set me off like a frikking Roman candle (next to telling me you voted for 43) is to intentionally transgress against civil grammar. By civil grammar, I mean speech which suggests you attended high school before having three kids, getting married and settling down.
Over the last few days I’ve hurled a lot of bitter invective at my radio during reports of the fourth anniversary of the launch of “Operation Monkey’s Vendetta,” what many know as the war in Iraq. I was stunned to hear a national announcer on National Public Radio March 18 refer to the “four year anniversary,” followed later in the day by a WUIS announcer referring to the day properly to my surprise and delight. An assortment of national TV news announcers also called it the “fourth anniversary, and on the 19th, a few national radio news people on UIS radio did the same. Until I heard respected news icon Daniel Schorr say “four-year anniversary” about 5:15 on the 19th, I was prepared to let the “wits of dim” pee their verbal ineptitude into the air waves the way I will welcome a call from a friend who calls me in the middle of a hot bowl of Campbell’s Fajita Steak Chunky Soup. . . . but DAN SCHORR? How COULD he? This bastion of linguistic professionalism and propriety speaking words his former boss Edward R. Murrow would surely have red-lined out of a prepared script bearing the same barn-yardishness . . . . well, I was glad I was sitting down when I heard him say it!
Why am I so bent? Because the word “anniversary” has sifted into our (our, meaning belonging to legal American citizens) language from annus, meaning year and vertere, meaning to turn. Saying fourth year anniversary is to say “fourth year year’s turning” and equipvalent to saying I’m going for a ride in my automobile car. Who needs the added word repetition? I shiraz heck don’t. (<– Aussie wine fans will chuckle over that).
My guess is that the illegal alien community, whose rights multiply like rabbits while US citizens’ rights leap like Aztec virgins into the volcanic fires of inconsequence, are responsible for the growth of superfluously repetitive, redundantly redundant, and excessive words that pollute the American language today. The crisp phrasing of yesterdecades has been trampled into the dust by so many damp-shouldered scorpions swimming across the Rio Grande and into our language. And you know something? That’s okay. Those who don’t know how to speak should be given a chance to learn. But those who do know the difference owe it to the language to show they know, that they care for the difference, and demonstrate to those who don’t know, what the difference is. This is our language, hombre and hombrecita. Love it or leaf it!
I bet the same Tallula-born-and-bred former Sangamon County Fair Queen contestant trying to play “grown up” who (I’m guessing) wrote the current silly drenched-diaper-ish (diaper rash, if you like) fund raising skit wafting odiferously into WUIS local programming this week knows how to say “fourth anniversary.” Don’t you?
Final thought for “Daniel the maniel:” Mr Schorr, you’re still a countenance for the side of a mountain in my book. I hope you keep in mind the beauty of the language that helped make you who you are because you cared for it once. I hope you remember how to care for it again.
Thanks for reading.
Live long . . . . . . . and proper.
