End English's Idiot-synceasies to Raise Mathematics' Invisible Ceiling

Acknowledgement to Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, especially his Fifth Rule of Power Tactics: “Ridicule is [our] most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then react to your advantage.” [In a war of words and ideas, that is. It is not effective against a pistol, rifle, missile or nuke.]

Acknowledgement to Gerry Spence, for How to Argue and Win Every Time and his many other books you should read.

One of my favorite higsh is information, the AHA!  I wondered what age we should begin teaching infants. The answer is: as soon as their systems function. Give them audio as soon as they can distinguish sounds and choose what they enjoy and need. As soon as their eyes focus, give them visual.

  I remember a line by the Firesign Theatre on Pacifica listener –supported radio during the Sixties, “This is your mind, and you grew it.” Awareness of self can be taught with a mirror. Offer shape6 (2,662, then 3 dimensional) then  pi    and a 3,4,5 right triangle, for a start. Sir Arthur C. Clarke said or wrote that any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be. We have the technology, so let’s do it."Margaret Wertheim, science writer for The New York Times,reflects upon an Australian mathematics classroom from her childhood and the way it changed her view of the world: When I was ten years ols old I had what I can only describe as a mystical experience. It came during a math class. We were learning about circles and, to his eternal credit, our teacher, Mr Maershall, let us discover for ourselves the secret unique to this unique shape: the number known as  pi . . . From that day on I knew I wanted to know more about the mathematical secrets hidden in theworld around me.:

 From ChattyHands.com  and Sign with your Baby by Joseph Garcia I learned at what age  one  system  becomes functional.A cartoon shows an infant thinking: "I can't talk yet, but I knw more than you think I do. '"

   They can acquire about seventy-five signs by the time they are nine months old. Infants are frustrated by their inability tospeak – because their physical equipment necessary for speech hasn’t developed yet. These are the Terrible Twos. .     “  . . .the potential for understanding mental activity in children between eight and twenty-two months of age that is made possible by sign language is intriguing.” Burton L. White, Ph.D. Why aren’t all parents signing with their infants? They should be so involved with teaching their child that they have neither time nor desire for more children. Think QuaLity not QuaNtity. 9-27-08 This just in: yourbabycanread.com

 I read and enjoyed much of Ayn Rand’s writings years ago, but only recently discovered The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. I quote from her essay The Comprachicos. Reprinted with permission.  

 “If, in any two years of adult life, men could learn as much as an infant learns in his frst two years, they would have the capacity of genius. . . Observe also the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. (If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man.)

 “A child’s cognitive development is not competed b y the time he is three years old – it is just about to begin in the full, cognitive sense of the term. He has merely traveled through the anteroom of cognition and acquired the prerequisites of knowledge and the rudimentary mental tools he needs to begin to learn. His mind is in a state of eager, impatient flux: he is unable to catch up with the impressions bombarding him from all sides; he wants to know everything and at once. After the gigantic effort to acquire his mental tools, he has an overwhelming need to use them.

 “For him, the world has just begun. It is an intelligible world; the chaos is in his mind, which he has not yet learned to organize  – this is his next, conceptual task. His every experience is a discovery; every impression it leaves in his mind is new . . .”

 WOW! It continues forty-seven more pages. It’s out of print. Out of print! It should be reprinted. Meanwhile, copies are available from used book dealers.I look forward to giving infants the opportunity to learn my better alphabet and easy efficient American language years sooner. Somewhere I read that whatever we do to or for a child, we will get back. I hope so.

As I  polished End English . . . and wondered what I should add, how I should I pad it (with illustrations?) so I could charge as much as others, I learned about A Grammar Book for you and I . . . Oops,Me! by C. Edward Good  (Hereafter, Oops or Ed) I got lucky, or so I thought. The Sussex-Wantage Library has it, saving me the bother of an interlibrary loan. Then I learned it has more than 400 pages.

I enjoy slaughtering sacred cows, the information kind. The library has The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Doesn’t everyone? Ten million copies are out there. Glancing through S&W I found something infuriating.If we have to choose either a word which could cause death and one which can’t, we should choose the non-lethal one. Strunk was so obsessed with what is “proper,” what is standard, that he urged us to use the killer. Case in point: flammable  inflammable  nonflammable.  Flammable is obvious but I’ll quote its definition anyway: easily set on fire; that will burn readily. The definition of inflammable is same as flammable. in means not, doesn’t it?  Not this time. And there’s invaluable, which means too valuable to be measured; priceless.  Huh?

How many people thought inflammable meant NOT flammable? That includes Doctor Nick of The Simpsons. How many people have died and how much property was destroyed because of this stupidity? Any is TOO MANY! Will a class-action suit be necessary to force the publisher to eliminate this Clear and Present Danger? Maybe Ed (he’s a lawyer) would like to defend the publisher? Military intelligence has been called an oxymoron, a contradiction. However, they learn eventually, sometimes at great cost. They stopped using the word inflammable. End of problem.

If you haven’t read Geprge Orwell’s 1984, you should. It describes a Police State in which words mean the opposite of what they did and words are eliminated to make it difficult to communicate.The word inflammable should be sent down Orwell’s Memory Hole and replaced with NONflammable and not flammable and invaluable should be replaced with very valuable.

Lack of precision communicating can lose a battle, which can lose a war. At the battle of Midway, the American commander (who was an Admiral, which is two ranks above a Commander. Confusing?) relied on the lack of precision in nippon go (the Japanese language) to plan his strategy. Too often some of us waste time considering which word is “proper.” That delay communicating could be fatal.Inefficient communication is expensive. George Bernard Shaw claimed an efficient alphabet would have saved as much money as Britain wasted on the second World War.

Look at the word flammable. Obviously it means capable of producing a flame. So why isn’t it spelled  flamabl and pronounced flAAmuhbl? It is from the Latin word flamma. That explains the double m. Sort of. Many languages have more sounds than letters. I have solved the problem with an alphabet which hasone and only one letter for each sound. Be patient. I’ll get back to this later.
 
I’ll admit it. In writing End English… I sought easy targets and found them. This may not be as easy. Ed Good’s credentials are impressive. He’s a lawyer. Most lawyers’ goal seems to be to win the case, not to achieve justice. He’s made a good living lawyering. He’s made a good living off grammar. He may not be receptive to simplifying it. We’ll see. His title is clever. I give credit where it’s due.
 
My resume is unique.[The accent agout (pronouncd ah goo) above the second e in resume disappeared from Symbols in WordSuck] Look up unique. It doesn’t mean what you probably  think it does. It means one of a kind. Period. When I think about what I’ve accomplished and attempted, I also think about all the bad things I haven’t done. Most of us read Ozymandius in English class. It would do you good to read it again. If you are not adequately concerned about our environment, you should read Joyce Kilmer’s poem Trees.
 
Look at Oops’ title. I consider it far more than enough grammar to succeed. It depends on how one defines succeed. I do not have, nor do I want, most of the toys of our possession-obsessed society. I do not need new toys. New does not mean better. It means unused. I do not need to own things I can rent or borrow. It is a nuisance to have to take care of and protect things. There are many books about freedom you can find if you want to be free. IF. “Liberty means responsibility and most men dread responsibility.” George Bernard Shaw.
 
 Look at Oops. We soon have a question. Do final quotation marks go before or after the period? The answer is on Page 411,”According to most style manuals [what about the rest of them?] they go after the period. There are exceptions. There are frequent exceptions. Why? Maybe to give Ed’s Grammar Police something to do. Grammar Police? The index is excellent but neither they nor Miss H (his high school English teacher) are included. Nor is the statement allegedly by Winston Churchill. Some of us will wonder, what does it matter: which comes first? In arithmetic, the order in which we add, subtract, multiply, and divide a series does matter. This is NOT arithmetic. Sometimes word and punctuation sequence matter. Sometimes they don’t.
 I lived the Sixties and I’m still living them. Timothy Leary urged us to “Question authority; think for yourself.” I urge you to. When you question authority in our language, you will often be told, “We’ve always done it that way. If it works, don’t fix it.”  If it works poorly, we should fix it. We can’t afford inefficiency.

Ed has high regard for Winston Churchill. My favorite quote allegedly by Churchill is, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”  Ed also has high regard for his junior high school English teacher, rMiss H. What if Churchill was in her class? Would he robot-like parrot whatever she demanded? Or would he tell her what he allegedly said, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put?” Miss H.sounds like the unquestioning robot too many of us were exposed to. The unquestioning robots she tried to turn us into. Why must we memorize stuff we can look up, IF we ever need it. You could always look it up is the title of one of William Safire’s many books. I heartily agree. Why look it up? Why not down? Why in any direction? Why look? Is that all you want to do? Is Search all you want to do? You should want to FIND. Call it a Finder, or Active Index.

 If Miss H had been open-minded, she would have suggested to Winston that he study the history of ending a sentence with a preposition. He would have found online Bishop Lowth was a Fool.  It’s not entirely her fault. She didn’t make it interesting because it couldn’t be done. A phonetic alphabet would eliminate many rules and exceptions to rules and other logical improvements would convert one of the most difficult languages to one of the easiest. How? Be patient.

If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it correctly. Unless Miss H was a sadist, she wasn’t having fun. Her students weren’t having fun either. Nothing is fun about memorizing illogical words and rules you may never again use. I call them Scholastic Aptitude Test Words and William F. Buckley words. Ed wrote one which is not in Webster’s Dictionary: sheepshank. Nobody likes a show-off. There are other ways writers showoff.  You may get tired of me telling you that, all other factors being the same, shorter isoften better. Sometimes there are enough other factors so that a longer word is better. Take vs.  Please do.  vs. is an abbreviation for a Latin word, versus, which means against. If Miss H had an engineering student in her class, when she used the word parse and defined it as “to break down,” he would have told her, “You mean “reverse engineer it.” How do we make learning English FUN? It’s easy. Easy for me. Maybe difficult for the mentally constipated. Use word games and crossword puzzles, not force and fear. If we can’t make it fun for someone, maybe it isn’t worth doing. My definition of fun includes satisfying. We can’t all be constantly giggling manically or experiencing a constant AHA! If the party never ends, it's not a party.  A Puritan is about to freak out. H. L. Mencken defined Puritan as someone haunted by the fear that someone somewhere may be happy. Puritanism is un-American, unConstitutional. Our State Constitutions spell out our Rights. Don't confuse Rights with Privileges.aRights must be demanded, taken, and sometimesfought for.Free people have weapons to defend themselves. Servants, slaves, and subject don't They may or maynot have privileges, which can easily be taken away.

 . Learn the difference.  Here’s Article 1, Section 1, New Jersey State Constitution, which was ratified on July 2, 1776, before the Declaration of Independence was signed. Many others are identical.

All persons are by nature free and independent, and have certain natural
and unalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending
life and liberty, of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and of
pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness.

 WOW!  I would have remembered that if they’d taught it in school. Why didn’t they? Smartasses such as me and maybe you would have asked, “Why are we in this Police-State nation, and not in that Paradise? Yes, Paradise! See how powerful words are. With the correct words we can open the door to Paradise. This is better than our Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed “only” our Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We have the right to safety and happiness, although there’s no guarantee we will find them.
 
 WOW! How long has this been going on? The New Jersey State Constitution was first issued in 1776, and reissued in 1844 and in 1947. That brigs up an interesting point: the word persons. It has become popular only recently as women and homosexuals demand their rights. Children are demanding their rights instead of “free” compulsory (don’t those words contradict each other?) public “education.” “Lockdown” is a prison term, but we hear it used about  schools. It should frighten you that you probably learned about government in schools owned and operated by the government. If that produced an AHA!, there is hope for you. Read books by John Taylor Gatto and John Holt, and Jonathan Kozol and others.

There are eighteen pages in Oopsin which ubject-Verb Agreement is mentioned and five on Subject-Verb Disagreement. Subjects and verbs are concerned with zero, one, and more than one. How can it take twenty-three pages to complicate such a basic concept?   Stupid rules cause confusion. Take the words occur and occurs. Problems (plural) occur. Why isn’t it occurs? Shouldn’t both be plural? What do we mean by agree? It has an an s on the end. A problem (singular) occurs.  Why does it have an s on the end if it is singular? Homer Simpson would say “Doh!” Your mission: discover other stupid rules. By using shorter sentences and eliminating stupid rules, we can minimize confusion.

A word by any other name . . . could be less or equally or more confusing. Our goal should be to eliminate confusion. Words should be descriptive and efficient and not confused with other words. By efficient I mean short and without silent and double letters, if possible. No unnecessary words.  We have seven pages about direct objects and only one page about indirect objects. Why not assume objects are direct and call them objects. For the rare occasions (for me, this is the first time in fifty years) when you refer to an indirect object, call it an indirect object. How many other unnecessary words could we eliminate?
 
Most verbs are called infinitive, finite, present participle and past participle.  Ed admits infinitive and finite confused him. Me too! We know that present participles have an –ing ending , so call them –ing verbs.  Past participle verbs have an -ed ending, so call them -ed verbs. The word infinitive comes from infinite, meaning endless. Infinitive verbs are base form and limited. Say what? Infinite – limited? This sounds like Orwell’s Newspeak (Freedom is slavery) or computer nerds’ Nurdlish (to exit, hit enter.). They are base form, so call them base verbs or dictionary verbs.  Finite verbs are the complicated form with all the conjugations and tenses. Call them complicated form. The definition of conjugated is joined together as in, ah, you know. It’s an appropriate term: we are being intellectually raped by these sadists.

What a  powerful the word NO is.  It or the word NOT can override all other words in a sentence. Make sure it isn’t hidden where readers won’t notice it. I shouldn’t have to remind you that double negatives cancel each other.

Dn’t tell us what NOT to do. TELL US WHAT TO DO.   Consider those NO! highway signs with the red circle with the red diagonal through them. The red is fading. Soon they will tell motorists to do what they shouldn’t do.
 
 When someone I am debating starts a sentence with “I don’t think . . .” I interrupt them with “That’s your problem.” Whatever the problem is in the English language, I’ve solved it, or almost all of it. Be patient."The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer" Construction Battalions slogan. Since being exposed to Oops! (doesn’t sound pleasant, does it?)  I realized we need to prioritize. We need Sunset Laws for words.

Ed recommends learning “proper” English because it will impress your boss (favorably). Too many of us have (or had before our job was downsized) bosses ( or CEOs, or whatever their title is) who are known as Chainsaw or Terminator. All they care about are the bottom line and their Golden Parachutes. Parachutes is plural; some are never satisfied. They wouldn’t know a subjunctive if it bit them.
 
On June 27, 2008 (the date is not important)  The Dog Whisperer said “you and I ,” which according to the cover of Ed’s book is not “proper.” I’m sure the dog didn’t notice. I’m sure the dog’s owner didn’t notice. I might not have noticed except that Oops! was in my plain view. I doubt that any of the show’s viewers noticed. Here comes Miss H. Perhaps she’ll say that in that instance you and I was the subject and it was correct. WHAT? I’m not going to clutter my mind with crap like that. My test is to delete you and see how it sounds.  Me will go?  I don’t think so. Maytbe I’ll use us or we, whichever sounds better. If neither sounds better, I’ll shrug. I would be more concerned about whether the dog may bite someone. PRIORITIZE!

A television show asks “Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader?” A more accurate question would be, “Do you remember all the trivia you were forced to learn, never needed, and long ago forgot?” That applies to grammar and many other things. If you don’t use an expression regularly you may lose it, or it’ll go into dead storage. You may be able to recall it in multiple choice, but not as a fill in the blank. You may use something regularly but forget what it is called. We use gerunds frequently, but I hadn’t heard the word in fifty years. I couldn’t have defined it to save my life.Could you?  Fortunately we didn’t need to. It is an –ing verb acting as a noun.\Example: Ridiculing is fun, though not for the ridiculed.  .
Oops is in it’s third printing. I wonder how many or how few read it completely. How many or few studied it.There’s a lot of good info in it along with material you’ll never need. The index is excellent, although not perfect. Winston Churchill’s alleged quote is missing.

 (We can blame font freaks for what just happened. In an earlier version, I used a word containing  nn.  Is that M or NN? How often have you typed rn and wondered whether it was M or RN. A oh eL dot com, or A zero eye or wun dot com?  Solution:  Sometimes when in doubt, use upper case letters). What if a ligature (tie) occurs between L and I in the word FLICK? It did in the credits of Lord of the Rings. I will buy a copy of Oops, and I urge you to. I’ll buy it used because it cost less and used books sometimes have comments in them, which I enjoy reading. Underline all unfamiliar terms.Create descriptive names for them. Focus on learning examples, not memorizing labels. Learn what they do, not what they’re called. When you are confident you understand the examples, you no longer need the label, so  you can put an X through it and Fuhgehdit.

 Make it simple and keep it simple. As an example of what some would call elegance and others (myself included) would call unnecessary complexity, Ed quotes Churchill on Page 418 from one of his best-known speeches, showing-off how complicated “proper” sentences can be. Look at all those clauses! Each could have been a complete sentence. Was any listener counting? Theycouldn't telll by listening They couldn’t even if they had a Ph.D. in English. Spoken words are more important than most punctuation. Listeners don’t care whether a speaker uses a semicolon, colon, comma, period, or whatever. A question and exclamation can be communicated by voice. Churchill’s audience was impressed by his words and his delivery of them and his pauses and gestures, not by his punctuation. I believe Victor Hugo holds the record for the longest sentence. Thomas Jefferson’s first sentence in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was eighteen lines long. Grammatik would have crashed.

I Hit the Ceiling and Go Over the Wall

Making English efficient should enable us to enjoy and learn more math. I enjoyed science and was very good at math. How good? A 680 (out of 800) SAT in 1956, before coaching was an industry. I was very good but not great.

Math went from Arabic numbers to numbers and English letters to numbers and letters and Greek letters. It became all Greek to me. Schaum’s Outline?All those examples? General Colin Powell abandoned engineering in his freshman year because of math. I could have transferred from Mechanical to Civil, Chemical or Industrial Engineering, but they didn’t interest me. It could have been worse. In Kafka’s short story the overstressed student died Beneath the Wheel. I went Over the Wall.

Lawrence of Arabia said, “There is nothing so restful as taking orders from fools.” I enjoyed driving and decided to drive a tractor-trailer. Union scale was “good money.” I bought gold and silver, a motorcycle and guns and ammo. It was the Sixties. I moved to the psychedelic East Village, where “acid” didn’t refer to pH, and the primary definition of “pot”was not a kitchen utensil, “swinging in the ghetto with the colored and the poor, where rats enjoy babies sleeping on the floor.” (Phil Ochs, Small Circle of Friends).  When two-legged rats abandoned a building next door and four-legged rats moved in, I moved back to Suburbia.

You may be fortunate and never hit your Ceiling. The higher your Ceiling, the more traumatic IF you hit it. A Stevens Institute Honors graduate Mechanical Engineer working (temporarily) as a Sears hardware department sales associate told me,  “Fluid Mechanics is fun.” Not for me. It was above my ceiling. An advertisement showing a blackboard with partial derivatives would set me off. I knew what they look like but not how to use them.

I read Opus 100  Isaac Asimov, Ph.D.. years later. It was comforting. He hit his Ceiling at Differential Calculus. He called it The Barrier. “Yes, I see” became “Hmmm…do that again.” Horror of horrors, he got a “B,” so he stopped taking math courses. He was fortunate. He was studying biochemistry and didn’t need more math.
Years later a friend called. “I have a test today in Calculus and I haven’t the slightest idea how to do it.” “You hit your Ceiling. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll survive. I did. But you can’t be an Electrical or Mechanical Engineer.” It comforted him. helped, but not enough. My progress on the learning curve slowed, then stopped. Professor Brower led us by the hand, but  when he let go, I was lost. Many of us hit our Invisible Ceiling. I hit mine at Differential Equations                                                 DAMN SANS SERIFMy father’s ceiling had been higher. He was a Stevens Tau Beta Pi (the engineering equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa) and a Professional Engineer. He had understood it. Other students couldn’t spell as well as I could, but understood it. Why? How did students with lower SATs understand it? I was good at taking tests. I was good but there are limits. An Electrical Engineer suggested I memorize examples.

Giving something back.

 I never learned in geometry that a 30, 60, 90 degree right triangle and a 3,4,5 right triangle are not congruent. They do not have the same angles. The 3, 4, 5’s angles are about 31 ½ and 58 ½ degrees. Close, but close counts only with grenades, nukes, and pitching horseshoes. I’m sure a teacher is saying “No one claimed they do.” They look the same so I assumed they do, as did a friend. I wonder how many others also assumed they do. I also wonder how many have no idea what I’m talking about.

Sooner is better

I am sure that, had I studied math sooner and more seriously and read books which make it fun, with practical applications as John Holt did in What Do I Do Monday? and Alfred S. Posamentier does in Math Charmers, and LEX America does in Who IsFourier? my Ceiling would have been higher. Instead, I cluttered my bioRAM and bioROM with idiot-syncrasies (neologisms – new words) of spelling, pronunciation and grammar. I cluttered them with digital data (such as sports statistics) I could look up IF I needed it. I cannot predict how far this could raise students’ Invisible Ceiling. Anything is better than nothing.Since writing that I discovered What's Math Got to Do With It? Helping Children Learn to Love Their Most Hated Subject, And Why It's Important to America  by Jo Bealer and Math Doesn't Suck and Kiss My Math by Danica McKeller.Some math books suck.  Quick Arithmetic has sold millions of copies although some answers are infuriatingly difficult to find. Hasn't anyone complained?

Left Brain Right Brain

I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edward, Ph.D. After a few lessons, I smoked Flowers of Cannabis. I heard my Left Brain tell my Right Brain “I can do this better than you can.” My Right Brain replied “Yes, but he wants ME to do it.” Someday I’ll again try drawing -- when I’m straight.

A Worldwide Auxiliary Language

I was good at English also (584 SAT), partly because I learned phonetics and not Look-Say. In high school I wrote a paper about our search for a worldwide language. It is not “universal” (everywhere in our universe). Only the Universe is universal. It’s not “galactic” (everywhere in our galaxy) or everywhere in our solar system. I decided if it happens, the language will be English. In What Global Language? in The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Wallraff explained why this is unlikely. However, we need and can have a worldwide auxiliary language. How? Modernize Obsolete English. Make it easy and efficient. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Parts of speech

        Nouns describe things and verbs describe actions. They are toggles, on or off. Adverbs modify verbs. In On Writing Stephen King warns writers “The adverb is not your friend.” Adverbs usually weaken verbs. Adjectives modify nouns. Why aren’t they called adnouns? What’s an ad? What’s a jective? They should be called modnouns and modverbs (or nounmods and verbmods).
Adjectives can be toggles, or comparative (the word more before the noun), or superlative (the word most before the noun.), OR . . .they may be followed by -ier or –e,r OR, . . followed by –iest or –est. OR . . . they may be irregular. Few Iiregular adjectives are used frequently. They could easily be regularized. Some “”brothers” and “sisters” say bad, badder, baddest. So say good, gooder, goodest. There are too many rules to mention here. If in doubt, use more and most. If misused, they don’t sound as bad as misusing -er or -ier and -est or –iest. See Wikipedia’s list of irregular adjectives which are rarely used and almost never used as comparatives and superlatives, except to show off. I call them “Wiliam F. Buckley words.” For more about adjectives or anything, visit Wikipedia.

Some adjectives are toggles. Something is first (or final) or it is not, but often we hear “very first.” !Impossible! Something is solid, or shut, or dead, or alive, or true, or false, or ? or it is not. My nominee for most misused word is: unique. Unique means  one of a kind. Period. Something can be extremely unusual, but unless there is only one of them, it is not unique.

?Is a pronoun a professional noun or in favor of a noun? Pronouns are replacements for nouns and noun phrases and have very general reference. They are vague nouns.
Conjunction is a longer way to say connector. Some are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.
A preposition is a word such as in, by, to, that connects a noun or pronoun to another word

An exclamation expresses excitement or strong feelings. !Yeah!

Fewer may be better

A, an, and the are articles. The is the most frequently used word in our  language. The is a function noun, used to indicate that the following noun is definite. A means one, one sort of, each, anyone and is used before words beginning with a consonant sound. A is our fourth most frequently used word. An also means one, one sort of, each, anyone, but is used before words beginning with a vowel sound. An is our 38th most frequently used word.

These words do not exist in the Russian language. How do Russians function without them? Efficiently. Perhaps more efficiently than we do. Remember: they had satellites in orbit before we did. Try it: “I have automobile. I go to store.” I will minimize my use of articles, using them only when omitting them would confuse readers and listeners. Have you noticed how few articles I used? How many other words can we do without? Actually, we actually can. Really! Definitely. Your mission: Find others – and stop using them.

Jackpot at a library. 

In a new books display at a favorite library I discovered Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton. Creole? Pidgin? I wanted to improve English. Oh, well, I might get something out of it. On Page 10 I learned that Bickerton is an autodidact – self taught.  He describes his technique. AHA! 

"I read aggressively, and I never hit my head on a brick wall.  

"Most students read passively. They see themselves as vessels waiting to be filled. They have awe and respect for the printed word. I  don't. I want to catch the authors out. I assume, correctly, that part of the stuff, maybe most of it, will be wrong. And I'm going to find out which part it is. Even if you know nothing   about a subject you can spot self- contradictions, and if you reasd two authors on the sametopic, you can spot regularcontradictions, They can't both be right. (They could both be wrong, though.)

""Most students hit their heads on brich walls. They're given a text to read, and somewhere in Chapter 1 or 2 they bog down completely. Butthey persevere, oh do they persevere! That's unless they decide to drop out  completely.) They feel  if they don't absorb Chapter 2 r to the very last syllable, they'll be totally lost when they get to Chapter 3. So they keep slugging away until their eyes glaze, trying to force understanding. Finally they sleep on it and start over again the next day.

"What I do is skim through the text looking for anything I understand. Sometimes at first it's as little as the introduction and a couple of paragraphs here and there .No mattrt. I store that in my mind and do something else. Read stuff about the subject that I do understand, stop again the moment it gets to be hard work. Then after a week or two, I come back to the first text, skim it again for anything that makes sense. There will be more this times, I guarantee it. Maybe not much, but a little more will statr to make sense. Repeat this process. You'll probagblyfind you're getting patches all over the book. Okay, fine. The patches spread like inkblots; eventuall they'll link up. Suddenly, what a few weeks ago was a trek through impenetrable jungle becomes through the park.

" You see, evolution has been programming brains for half a billion years. It has been programming them to sort incoming datsa and make selse of it. A life-or-death matter only those who do it well survive.The  brain doesn't care what kind of data. Whistles and roars on the savanna or words on the printed page -- it just sorts, imterprets, and stores, whether you're conscious of it or not. In fact the brain probably works better when you leave i to its owqn devices. The French mathematician Henri Poincare once spent months trying to solve a heavy-weight math problem; finally he put it aside in disgust, and one morning a few months later, just as he was boarding a city bus, the solution popped out of nowhere, ready made."    . E

IT WIRKS!I had unwittingly used the skin, pause and repeat method in hih school.   I  hadn’t studied geometryenough and got Ds on quizzes. By mid-term it had sunk in and I got an A on the exam. I don’t remember what I got on the final.I might not have had to take it. 0000 Bickerton looks for mistakes. So do I. I enjoy finding mistakes and omissions. It means I understand the subject. One author used an abbreviation more than a dozen times but never defined it. Indexes are usually inadequate, even tho word processors make it easy, so I add to them.

I underline, using a graphite pencil, because I may want to erase it later, and lightly if it is a library book,  important passages and comment in margins. Often punctuation marks are enough,  ? or ! or ? or X if I don't agree.  I do NOT use a yello highlighter becaue it photocopies dark. Often we will remember a facrt but not it's source. If we have to choose between learning and example and it's name, learn the example.

On Page 54 I learned:

“When speakers of many different languages are brought into contact with one another, communication is reduced to a minimum, and anything not essential for communication is stripped off. That includes the inflections that express things like tense, aspect, number (singular versus plural), and person; it’s much easier at first contact to use invariant pronouns and verbs than to try to remember all those bits at the ends of words. That’s fine if the language is just an auxiliary, one you use when you have to.

“It’s not fine if it’s the only one you have. People have a built-in need to indicate when actions happened or might happen and whether you’re talking about something that repeated itself or was a background condition or just happened one time.”

Part of the problem and solution

Selig O. Wassner, a retired linguist, complained in a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, the self-professed Friend of the people it serves, The Record, that there is a conspiracy to kill English. Readers pleaded, “Please help us all.” They cherish its needless complexity. English is suffocating from rules and exceptions to rules and exceptions to exceptions. We should focus on being understood, simplification and standardization. Strip off all those bits. Regularize everything. Make all plurals regular by adding s or es or z or ez. Regularize our more than one hundred irregular verbs. Make subjects and verbs agree.

 I or ME ? HE or HIM? WE or US? THEY or THEM or THOSE?? It doesn’t matter as long as we don’t confuse them with YOU and SHE (or HER) and THEM or THESE. I, you, he, she, we, they, did go, go, going, will go. We don’t need IS AM ARE.
WHO or WHOM? Wassner kvetches ,“I am afraid WHO is scoring a home run. And there goes the Yankee language.” So? Why fear it? Who needs WHOM? WHOM sounds as if the speaker or writer is showing off even if it is used “correctly.” When used incorrectly, it sounds terrible.

What if something sounds strange? You got a problem wit dat? Get used to it. Everything sounds strange to adults learning another language and infants. Learn to live with it. I made the objective case optional. ?So? The sky didn’t fall and Hell didn’t freeze. Arguing THAT or WHICH is for people who have nothing better to do, or can make a living off it.

We should call people’s homelands what they call them,

and call people and their language what they call them. However, I won’t call any country free or a or a republic or whatever if it is not. E .J. Dionne, Jr. commented in The Washington  Post on Jan 4,1999, that the old communist dictatorship in the former East Germany called itself the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. This so infuriated anti-communists that they routinely added sogenante[so-called] to the title.If you wondered why, on the TV show M.A.S.H., Koreans are called Gooks, they call their country Hangook , their language Hangul, and they are Hangooksaram.

English spelling and pronunciation are difficult

partly because we have taken words from many languages along with their idiot-syncrasies, partly because English has twenty-six letters (including QX which we don’t need) and forty sounds. I argue that any more sounds are diphthongs, or combinations of sounds. Medieval scribes made mistakes, and self-professed “authorities” made intentional, illogical changes that were passed down and accepted unthinkingly by human parrots. In his dictionaries Noah Webster made many spelling simplifications. Many were accepted; some were not. President Theodore Roosevelt made a heroic attempt to reform spelling but “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.”(Schiller) Congress rejected the improvements. The publisher of the Chicago Tribunemade simplifications and claimed readers approved 3 to 1 but eventually canceled them. Technology creates new problems. A letter we don’t need --x – has two different sounds in Xerox®  Disc or disk? Letters c and k have a long history. Why did computer nerds choose d-i-s-k? I don’t know. We should ask why wasn’t the Dumb Operating System, the Damned Operating System, programmed to accept either spelling? It would have been one fewer thing “We just have to remember.”
We (still) have the Dying Operating System, soon to be the Dead Operating System. We should have learned that if there are two equally logical possibilities, we should be free to choose either. If they are the same, why should we have a choice? Every choice necessitates a decision. The victim may wonder: why am I given a choice? What may happen if I make a wrong decision? Make it Simple and Keep It Simple.

What would George Bernard Shaw think?

Twenty years ago I read On Language by George Bernard Shaw. It is out of print. Ars brevis, vita brevis, omnis brevis? Shaw was the Nobel prize-winning playwright who encouraged a new alphabet. He provided in his will for a contest to design a new, phonetic alphabet. It was called Shavian I read other linguists, had some inspirations, and created a better version of our alphabet. I sought advice, kept improving it, and when constructive critics stopped asking, “What about… ,” I was satisfied. Letters look and sound as they should. Bruce Beach, coordinator of the World Language Process, called it “very, very good.” I didn’t expect him to say it is better than his new alphabet, but I’m convinced it is. It is consistent and insures that words will be spelled and pronounced correctly, and is understandable by anyone who understands our Obsolete English. No more exceptions to rules and exceptions to exceptions My better alphabet is phonetic so spelling must change as pronunciation changes.. It took hundreds of years for our language to get so messed up. My better alphabet may not be available immediately. Be patient. and failed because it required adults to stop using what they’d used all their lives and learn something totally strange.

Pronunciation

The dialect I use n my dictionary will be that spoken by newscasters in New York City and LA and SF and Minneapolis and Canada (without their stupid zed. Pronunciation will not follow any stupid rule which makes words less understandable, such as that a certain number syllable is always emphasized. In-DE-fah-tEE-guh-bl refers to fatigue, not to fat. Only human parrots will pronounce it in-dee-FAT-ih-guh-bl.  Im-PO-tent means lack of potency, lack of power. WHy pronounce it IMP-it-int? It does not refer to imps, although some men may think imps cause the problem..        

 Punctuation

Punctuation is instructions - signs - that tell the reader what to do. It is everything in written language other than letters and numbers.
A period . is usually put at the end of a sentence. If it’s between numbers, it’s called a decimal point.
A semi-colon ; connects two phrases that could each stand on its own.
A colon : introduces almost anything: a word, a phrase, a sentence, a quotation or a list.
A comma indicates a pause. In Newsweek, July 23, 2007 Robert J. Samuelson commented about The Sad Fate of the Comma. ”In text messages and e-mails, commas appear infrequently, and often by accident (someone hit the wrong key) . . .The comma is, after all, a small sign that flashes PAUSE. It tells the reader to slowdown, think a bit, and then move on. We don’t have time for that. No pauses allowed.”
In some of the world a comma means a decimal point. To minimize confusion, the British use spaces where we use commas in long numbers. 1 000 000 is a million. Someday we will do it, possibly after confusion causes a disaster. Then I will shout , “HEY, STUPID! I WARNED YOU! They didn’t have to die.”
The comma looks too much like the period and apostrophe and is too close to the period on keyboards. You’ll agree when your eyes are as old as mine. Computer nerds don’t use ergonomics. It means designing stuff to fit people instead of forcing people to adapt to it. “You just have to remember” is stupid.
A hyphen is used between compound words and long numbers such as telephone and credit card numbers where it is needed.  Whether or not to hyphenate compound words is complicated. Read Chapter 40 ofOops, read the Wall Street Journal, be consistent and consult a dictionary. The age of a dictionary matters. Some words went t from separate words to hyphenated ones to combined words. Old dictionaries remind us how far we've come sexuallyin the paast fifty years to the Sexual Revoolution to our Age of Enlightenemnt. Definitions such as self-pollution created generations of neurotics.                        

 . It can ( should?) be used in place of a comma to indicate a pause; it is more visible than a comma.Typeface freaks inflict on us two different length hyphens, but don’t give us a micrometer or dial caliper. The shorter hyphen is a minus sign. It will be the same length on my typeface.
Dashes – before and after something --set it off. A dash can indicate a longer pause. We have n-width and m-width dashes. Neither is on standard keyboards. Computer nerds are stupid and forgot to include them, or hate us and did it deliberately. There are no other possibilities. My keyboard will have an m-width dash. To learn how fossils want us to use both dashes, see the Chicago Manual of Style [and Relics].
A question mark ? indicates a question. What is not obvious is why it is not at the start of a sentence, as in espanol, so readers know what is coming. It should NOT be upside down. A question mark at the start is not necessary if the sentence starts with an interrogative word such as how, what, when, where, which, who, or why. A question mark at the start of a sentence before a word not normally considered interrogative is informative. Putting it also at ends of sentences should be optional.
Computer nerds make it difficult to find and use the tilde ( ~) the symbol  above the letter n. It has the sound nyuh so I will spell it nyuh. I thought I might find it in SpellSuck, but now you know why I call it SpellSuck. Computer nerds do not discriminate; they hate all of us.

An exclamation point ! and where it should be and why is obvious.
Quotation marks “ ” are used in pairs before and after a quotation, phrase or word.
Parentheses ( ) are used in pairs to enclose words or figures that clarify or are used as an aside.
Brackets [ ] are used in pairs to enclose comments, criticism or correction by someone other than the original speaker. An ellipsis . . . is three dots which indicate an intentional omission of a word or phrase, a pause in speech, an unfinished thought or a trailing off into silence. . .

“Diags (my abbreviation for diagonals) / confuse us. Computer nerds call them slash and back slash. Why they have so many violent terms in their vocabulary may be a good subject for a Master’s or Doctoral dissertation or article by a psychiatrist. The diagonal in fractions ( as in ½ ) is called a virgule and is a different angle from the diag.Why? Mine will have the same angle. My keyboard will not have the back diag. For we who remember analog clocks, what about 1:35 o’clock or 1:35 to describe the diag? ?Something to think about? My keyboard will omit the relic ampersand, that funny-looking symbol used only between names in a corporation or to indicate and. A single plus symbol is enough.  
We can use an African tribe’s click as an audible exclamation point. The – pronounced KOsa -- tribe have thee different clicks. One is enough for us and we shouldn’t overdo it. We can use enh and huh as audible question marks. Homer Simpson’s “ Doh!” is in dictionaries. It means “I messed up.” It should not be confused with“Duh!” which was explained in a Hyundai automobile commercial and means, “It’s obvious.”
Consider the word and. It has three sounds; ah, n, and d. In espanol the letter y has an EE sound and means and. We could use upper case E or a plus symbol to indicate and.

Shaw hated apostrophes.

 “I have written aint, dont, havent, shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only when its omission would suggest another word: for example hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of papering pages with these uncouth bacilli.”
If it’s its,it’s its. If it’s it is, it’s it’s. [If there are typos in that, or anywhere, blame WordSuck.] What a waste of bioROM! If you need an apostrophe, use it. If you dont, dont. You wont.
Were these the ’90s? Or the 90’s? Or the 90s? I was as adamantly in favor of ’90s as William Safire and The New York Times are in favor of 90’s. If they think we can do without an apostrophe in the first location and I think we can go without it in the second, we can do without it in both places.

To eliminate confusion, eliminate confusing definitions.

Too many words are homonyms; they sound alike. Raze means knock down; raise means build. We should use words and definitions in a manner that they can’t be MISunderstood, and stop using words which can be misunderstood. Does last mean final or previous? Does cleave mean cut apart or stick together? Which one to keep? A cleaver is used to cut apart. No cleaver sticks meat together.
Noam Chomsky speaking on universal grammar, an audio tape, asked: “What does ‘The chicken is ready to eat’ mean?” Is the chicken hungry or cooked? He means worldwide. A [sic] should be after universal. Sic means thus; so; used within brackets, [sic], to show that a quoted passage, especially one containing some error, is precisely reproduced. It’s not often a dropout can sic Chomsky.
A passenger directed me: “Turn right here.” “I can’t; there’s no street on the right.” “I mean, turn left right here.” “No, you mean ‘Turn left here’ or ‘Turn left now.’” ?Remember Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?”

Grammar

Grammar is the study of how sentences of a language are con,structed. Syntax is the study of rules for formatting grammatical sentences. We shouldn’t need to study them. They should be obvious with few, simple rules.
Find online Bishop Lowth was a fool by Scott E. Kapel, Ph.D. English is a Germanic language. Lowth tried to force Latin grammar on English. William and Mary Morris in the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage explain, “that’s not the way English works.” Split infinitives are not possible in Latin. The Little, Brown Handbook states: “A split infinitive may sometimes be natural and preferable, though it may irritate some readers.” A sentence in Latin almost never ends with a preposition. Sentences frequently end with a preposition in English, quite naturally. The most famous quote about grammar may be Winston Churchill’s “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.
A Public Broadcasting station offered as a premium a T-shirt with words in Latin which translated to:    “ If you can read this, you are overeducated”. I thought it should have been. . . miseducated. 
Clichés are overused expressions used by human parrots. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce called them old saws used by people with wooden heads. Clichés drive me up the wall, like a hot knife through butter, like chalk scraping on a blackboard. At this point in time I wish people would avoid them like the plague; maybe then I’d have a nice day. Or “a good day.” People got tired of “Have a nice day.” It’s very unlikely I’ll have a great day. I’ll be satisfied with a day without verbal audio pollution.
What time is it? Verbs describe time. Does time have points? Nonsense. Then and now. Past, present and future. There are subtle aspects to these, called tenses. Know-it-alls don’t know it all. A little knowledge can be dangerous. Anyone who gives tenses absurd names is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Latin inflicted us with the word Perfect to describe a tense. ?Perfect tense? What’s perfect about it, and why? And there’s the pluperfect tense. What’s a plu? From Latin (remember Bishop Lowth?) plus quam perfectum means more than perfect. More than perfect? It’s also called past perfect in English. “Also called.” That’s something else computer nerds do to us: give something two names to confuse us. Now you know why everyone hates grammar. ?Everyone? Everyone except those who live off it.

much worse, I learned in an e-mail from Teresa Fisher. “: a laxative for the mentally constipatedFrench is a very deceptive language. Many of the words are so similar to English that it’s easy to guess the meaning, and the unwary student thinks, “Hey! This should be easy!” What the victim doesn’t know is that French grammar is a killer. Many verbs are irrregular, there are all sorts of rules and exceptions to rules and too many tenses for me to count. I can barely express myself in the present, much less discuss something I did in the past or will do in the future. I frightened myself by looking in the back of the book and finding “pluperfect subjunctive.”
I studied Arabic for a short time. Shorter was better. I don’t want to know how Arabic compares to French. Reportedly diplomats like French because it has a small vocabulary

Regularizing irregular verbs a laxative for the mentally constipated

The bad news is: there are 174 or more of them. The not-so-bad news is: many you will never use. Many sound strange used “properly.” Remember: know-it-alls created them. They are easy to regularize. Strip away the bits. Start with basics. Verbs describe time. Their base form describes present – now. Their irregular forms describe past and future. We can describe past with did before a verb or -ed or - d after it. We can describe future with will before the verb.With -ing after a verb, it's called a present participle. You can forget that term.                                                         er a verb, it’s called a present participle. You can forget that term. Here’s an example: I did look or I looked. I look. I looking. I will look. ?Got a problem wit dat? It’s your problem. -ing has am or are before -ing but we don’t need am or are. Operative word: need. People who have used a word all their lives may not be willing or able to overcome the habit. No problem, but anyone who has learned to get along without words like am or are may snort derisively or look condescendingly at them. There will be few irregular forms we need to keep. Very few.

Pidgin and legal and computer jargon

On Page 251 of Bickerton we learn that Pidgin is a much reduced form of language used when people speaking two or more mutually incomprehensible languages have to communicate with each other.
Researching Pidgin Hawaiian, Derek Bickerton’s student Sarah Roberts discovered that court records were the best source of a language. “. . .it’s essential in court proceedings to record accurately any remarks relevant to the case . . . exact words must be given, preferably in whatever language, or mix of languages, was actually used. (Sometimes interpreters had to be used, but this arrangement was always made clear in the records.) ”. . . court records are neutral. They are not biased in the direction of English or Hawaiian or any other language (pages 212-215).Courtrooms are a source of dying and dead languages such as Latin, but courtrooms are used by living, changeable people. The American language should be used whenever possible in American courtrooms. We should insist so we know what’s happening and don’t need to hire translators (lawyers).  Courtrooms remind us of Alice in Wonderland, where words mean what Humpty Dumpty wants them to mean  .He deserved his great fall. Judges lie to jurors about jurors’ right and duty to decide the law AND the facts, called Jury’s Veto Power. It is also called Jury’s Right to Nullification of the law, confusingly abbreviated to Jury Nullification. That is what is happening. Juries are being nullified by corrupt judges who treat jurors like puppets. Once upon a time (what a dumb expression!) during the good old days(which in many ways were not good), jurors were paid what a doctor earned so people looked forward to serving. Their pay must keep up with inflation. Learn about Fully Informed Jury at FIJA.org

People rarely learn English unless they are forced to or need to, and many learn only as much as they need. They reject MSYHTR, pronounced mis-Yuh-hitter, - More stuff ( or s---) you have to remember. Or MSEMR, pronounced mis-ehmr – More stuff everyone must remember. I created those acronyms.
Black English and Ebonics and small chldren’s speech are duh way it spoz tuh be. Say dem and day and doze and dat aloud, then the equivalent vibrating “th” words. Which require more effort? Which are more more energy-efficient than “proper” English?  Why aren’t we taught to be energy-efficient? Your mission: use dem and find and use others.
New technology brings new words; many are not needed or are intentionally confusing. Nerds have gone beyond creating new words by redefining words. They call themselves Geeks. In every dictionary nted before nerds polluted them with their nurdwurdz, geek is defined as a carnival performer who bites heads off live chickens. If nerds claim to be geeks, they should be required to demonstrate it. Then probably People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals will get involved In this case, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

WordsuckSuck is my nane for all word processing  software: Microshaft WordSuck, Word-Will-Never-Be-Perfect, and WordStar. I hope WordStar   has gone supernova. Arthur Naiman, the author of the "best" (publisher's claim) book about it wouldn't use it to write his book. He told victims how to insert a hard carriage return, but not how to remove ine.  This in a book called  Introduction to, or Mastering, or Supercharging.         Mastering, or Supercharging, or Introduction to

 ion t  . . . It’s still available from Amazon.com for $.01. That’s a penny! It’s typical non-absorbent paper, and not perforatedso it isn’t even good toilet paper.
How to replace computer jargon and design ergonomically will be the subject of my next essay. I may have to use WordSuck so be patient. Tell me what you want. has gone supernova. Arthur Nauman, the author of the “best” (publisher’s claim) book about it, didn’t use it to write his book. He told victims how to insert a hard carriage return, but not how to remove one. 

        I’ve mentioned several books, so I’ll tell you how you can save money on them. Some books you’ll read once, Why buy them if you can borrow them from a library or inter-library loan? Other books you’ll want to keep for reference or pleasure. Why buy a book new if you can get it used? If it was  published recently, it may not yet be available used.  It may seem like Amazon’s dealers have every book. Not quite.  Alibris.com and abebooks also have millions of books. . Other sources also have millions of books. BetterWorld.com doesn’t charge for shipping and donate their profits to Global Literacy.

We need to start with environmentally correct clean sheets of recycled paper (the back of scrap paper for rough drafts) and create a simple, standard language. English and American are not the same, as Robert MacNeil pointed out in Do You Speak American? Easy Efficient American will be the Worldwide Auxiliary Language, and may be as close as we will come to a worldwide language. When it is easy, people will enthusiastically learn it so they can communicate with us and enjoy our classics.
Alinsky 
Kafka
Ochs
Asimov
Holt
Posamentier
Edwards
Wallraff
King
Bickerton
Wassner
Dionne
Shaw
Samuelson
Cbicago
Chomsky
Kapel
Morris
Little
Bierce
MacNeil
Sorry about any typos. Blame WordSuck.
©2008 Ed Hughes TheFriendlyStranger.com thefriendlystranger@hotmail.com I’m usually friendly; sometimes I’m strange.