Editor,
Three cheers for Eric Howerton! I salute him for the language expert and razor-sharp satirist that he is.
In his Nov. 1 column, his modest proposal for restoring "appreciation" to the language of Shakespeare, Eliot, and Seinfeld neatly skewers many myths about language perpetrated by so-called "language mavens" and associated blowhards. However, he may have aimed above the non-specialist audience of the Lobo, so I am writing this handy guide to get everyone in on the joke.
First of all, like Frankenstein, English is essentially Germanic. While much in the way of foreign vocabulary has been added to English, and while many of the Germanic word endings (more on those later) have been worn down, the Teutonic core remains essentially intact. And contrary to Howerton's ersatz protestations, spoken English is notoriously tough to crack, particularly verb-preposition complexes and articles (the bane of many an Asian ESL student.) It's too bad that some busybody editor at the Lobo corrected Howerton's "thee" (in the printed edition) to "thou" (in the electronic version), because it robs our wider community of the delicious irony: in all the talk about proper English grammar, "thee" was used as a subject pronoun - which it isn't, unless you're a Quaker.
Then there's the issue of assassinating verb tenses, which was a master stroke on Eric's part. Old English (around 900 CE) had just as many single-word tenses as Modern English, with some more personal inflections in the singular, and a slightly better developed subjunctive. Add that to that Modern English has a whole set of multi-word tenses not available to Old English, and you have a statement that left me howling at its genius. Of course, the real joke is that by the time we get to Early Modern English, when most of the changes had taken place, we had to deal with lesser intellects like Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, and Pope. Is this guy wickedly funny, or what?
One measure of satire is the number of errors that can be crammed into a limited space. By that measure, Howerton's piece deserves to be studied by freshmen for years to come. I can only give brief mention to the other solecisms: the idea that pronunciation has anything to do with writing, that more doodads on the ends of words lead to greater precision, that there are two present-tense forms of the verb "to be" in English (there are three), inappropriate metaphors, establishing an "AcadÇmie Anglaise" to safeguard the virtue of our language, and on and on. In fact, the error-to-sentence ratio approaches 100 percent. Such tomfoolery cannot (to borrow a phrase from creation scientists, themselves unsung practitioners of deep and hilarious irony) have come about by mere chance. There had to be a design.
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Eric Howerton, master designer, wit, and wordsmith extraordinaire, I salute you!
Dan Parvaz
UNM graduate student
