I was talking with one of my nieces last fall about the destruction of the English language. She’s a middle school English teacher, so she’s on the front lines. We’re losing the English battle.
Middle school kids — those in grades 6-8 — are deconstructing the language verb by verb, noun by noun and incomplete thought by incomplete thought.
By the time they reach adulthood, no one will be able communicate by anything more than a text message or tweet. Poetry and prose will be a thing of the past. All we’ll have left is “IMG” and sayings like, “I know, right?”
I had never heard that last saying when my niece mentioned it.
“Are you sure that’s what the kids are saying?” I asked her.
“Oh, I’m sure,” she said. “I know it’s right because every kid says it every 15 seconds.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Really,” she said.
“How do they use it?” I asked.
“They use it anywhere, anytime. They use it comment on a statement. They use it reply to a question. They use it when no one has even said anything.”
“This sounds bad,” I said. “It’s as bad as when ‘like’ infected the language. In fact, I still hear it used all of the time.”
“It’s worse,” she said. “‘Like’ was tossed in as an extra word. ‘I know, right?’ is used by itself.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Here are some examples,” she said.
“Someone says that it’s cold outside. The reply: ‘I know, right?’
“Someone asks if it’s too late to go to the movies. The reply: ‘I know, right?’
“‘I know, right?’ is the perfect universal saying,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything under any circumstance.”
When I was a teen, my friends and I would invent our own lingo. We repurposed the word “afford” as a verb, as in “afford me that soda pop.”
We also repurposed the word “unit” as a universal noun. A car could be a unit. So could a house, a dog or a firecracker.
The ultimate sentence was “Afford me that unit.”
The difference was that no one outside about a dozen of my friends knew what the heck we were talking about. It was our own code.
But eight months after that conversation with my niece, I hear “I know, right?” all of the time.
My kids say it. I hear it on television and on the radio. I hear it in advertisements.
The other day, I was talking about the language with my wife, as she was puttering around the house.
“Do you realize that English is going downhill?” I said. “People use totally meaningless phrases and sayings just to fill the air. They have nothing to do with any part of the thought process.
“I mean, at the rate we’re going, English will be a lost language, right up there with Latin and Aramaic. We won’t be able to communicate at all….”
My wife turned, looked at me thoughtfully and said, “I know, right?”
