Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Back to Old English -- and not the polish

A brief departure from normal blog topics:

One of the many anecdotes sure to be included in my yet-to-be-written-but-always-threatened childhood memoir is what my Dad would say when Bryan and I were verbally lazy and slangy: "English is such a wonderful language. Why don't you use it?"
I thought of that tonight after Anni strongly suggested that I drop the occasional use of lazy English on the blog, even if it's conversational and used for a certain effect.
"It belittles everything else you do on there," Anni said, protesting my recent use of the word "'cuz," among other grammatical nightmares.
Anyway, her point was well taken. In fact, I always thought of this as your go-to site for highbrow, scholarly passages. Consider, if you will, this literary gem from an entry about Elise's bath a few months ago:

Everything was going swimmingly -- until someone had a bowel movement in her bath chair. I told Anni that we're definitely parents now when we have an exchange like this:
"There's crap all over the bathtub," I said while cleaning the tub.
"Well, it's one less diaper to change," she said.

Highbrow, indeed. Now back to writing about the baby.

1 comment:

Leslie Wood said...

Yep, we're family. My father's favorite was when I was a kid was, "enunciate."