Tell them their pillar of faith is ascending
Jet black skies and amber incandescence. My sordid affair with the English language is an issue of consternation for some people. I view communication as one of the more necessary and sometimes enjoyable aspects of existence so my cudgel-like approach to it is right to cause concern. I view the English written language as something to play with and tickle in the right places akin to a kitten, whereas others only see rules to obediently follow, tongue lolling at the prospect of dangling past-participles. That analogy was originally going to be clay-based but who am I to deny a kitten based segue?
I have never been classically trained in the fine art of English language; I was given the boot-campesque course in grammar and spelling served in, what I presume, most public schools worth their salt offer but it took my own initiative to learn semi-colon usage and past-participle meaning and then dutifully ignoring them. The classically trained people went to grammar schools, imagine, entire schools devoted to the pursuit of grammatical perfection. Those people are the ones who look down their noses at you were you to misuse practise and practice, as if it’s some kind of literary genocide to add an apostrophe ess onto the end of a word which already ends in an ess.
That sort of thinking doesn’t make a good bedfellow for me, simply because it places a restriction on expression. I’m not talking about some lentil-based hippy utopia where we can all scatter apostrophes to the breeze and correct adverb or pronoun usage is a dark art. If I want to begin a sentence with a conjunction I feel no compulsion not to do it, it doesn’t denigrate the paper-thin message I’m trying to convey nor does it make me break out into an obsessive compulsive twitch like I’ve seen it do. My writing tends to parch and warp when I start applying rules, contractions run for the hills and brackets are an endangered species, all in the name of some puritanical grammatical doctrine.
I have been writing in one form or another since I crested double digits, from my adventures in anthropomorphism with my two pet cats through to my seminal horror foray to sequential writing on varying topics of little to no worth on the tinterweb. I enjoy writing for what it can convey and seeing how far the English language can grow and change rather than be restricted in some historical and nostalgic bog.
