The Invasion of the Language Zombies, Part 1

Noel Coward said, “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.”  Unfortunately, I am unable to influence all the incompetent speakers and writers of English, the language zombies, to take a long walk and stop inflicting their substandard usage on me and the language deprived rising generation. We are confronted daily by illiterate grammar and syntax in newspapers, letters, posts, e-mails, tweets, ubiquitous text jargon, readers' comments online, television, film, modern "literature," etcetera, et al., ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

There was a time in my teaching career when one could advise students struggling to choose the correct verb form in a sentence they were writing to say the sentence out loud. Once they heard themselves say the sentence they could with few failures select the correct form.  Because they rarely hear or read correctly spoken or written English, students cannot use that trick today.
While we do teach implicit vocabulary in English language arts classes, we no longer formally teach grammar and syntax on a regular basis. Language conventions are given short shrift. Students are supposed to pick up correct usage in speaking and writing by osmosis from reading. They are certainly not "picking it up" from reading social media messages from peers who are just as illiterate as they are. And then there is the teacher in faculty meeting a few weeks ago who, in a discussion of tardy problems, said, "Students are still moving slowly in the halls even after the bell has rang." AAIIIEEEEE!  That hurts my ears as horribly as the proverbial fingernails scraping the chalkboard. It's RUNG, not rang; has RUNG = auxiliary verb + past participle! It is not that difficult. No mental osmosis going to transpire there.
(I know everyone, even educated, intelligent people, makes an occasional mistake when he or she is speaking and sorting multiple thoughts at the same time. A slip or two is forgivable. I, even I, have made a few grammar and punctuation mistakes, typos, misspeaks, and actual misspellings in my 66 years. But, I do own a dictionary, several, and I do proofread 99% of what I write before I publish. [That includes texts, tweets, and e-mails!] Is it too much to ask that others do the same?)

Then there is the flagrant and mass mispronunciation of words. One that is especially noxious is the verb "harass" with the noun form "harassment." People see the a double s, and seemingly loving to say the "a" word as much as possible, put the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the first where it belongs. My school district requires that all teachers view a policy presentation at the beginning of each year. One module of the presentation is on forms of harassment. The narrator must have said "harASS" and "harASSment" twenty times. Doesn't anyone have a dictionary? Just Google the word. There will be a dictionary listing showing the diacritical markings to help you correctly pronounce the word. If that is too difficult, there is a little speaker icon, which when you click on the icon, the  nice computer will pronounce it for you. It's not that difficult.

ha·rass·ment

həˈrasm(ə)nt,ˈharəsm(ə)nt/

noun

noun: harassment; plural noun: harassments

1. 1.

   aggressive pressure or intimidation.

   "they face daily harassment by the police"

   synonyms:

   persecution, intimidation, pressure, force, coercion;

I shall not even try to eulogize the wonderful subjunctive of "to be." It has been bludgeoned to death and sucked dry by the language zombies. Would that I were eloquent enough to raise it from the bone yard. But, alas, if I were to do so, it would wander a stranger to all save me. Maybe I should just take a long walk with a medicinal dose of Bach.