Letters to the Editor
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Misguided but worthwhile
I remember an incident in my Latin class when the professor was discussing grammar. She brought up the outrage of various grammarians at the Oscar Meyer Wiener commercial tagline: "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner". The correct grammar, of course, would be "I wish I were". Egad! Language, my professor said, changes, and that which was wrong before becomes right when enough people use it. When I related this incident to a friend who studied linguistics, he exploded. Grammar, he said, is a set of preposterous (and arbitrary) rules the elites come up with to separate themselves from the "vulgar" masses.
The line between "smart" and "dumb" is fuzzy and contorted. My advisor in graduate school always listened to jazz and classical music, while these days, I can walk in on my current supervisor and find him blasting trance. Both are tenured professors, smart and educated, experts in their field. Go figure.
There was a time when Shakespeare's plays (and theatre in general) was considered to be a vulgar type of entertainment for the masses. Ballet was a form of strip-tease. Actors were considered the worst sort of scoundrels and the knight poems of, say, Chretien de Troyes were trash reading for the lazy and bored. Don Quixote went bonkers and began attacking windmills as a result of, Cervantes tells us, reading too many medieval romances... texts that today are rigorously studied by academics and revered as treasured classics. But I'm preaching to the choir, ain't I?
Lamenting the loss of intellectualism in these scary modern days is a dead end. We cannot go back to how the world was, we have to go forward. Whenever someone writes a lament like that, they've probably reached the stage of their career when they're ossified in their perceptions, unable to absorb the new and therefore must sit on their porch lamenting about the bygone "good old days". Of course, I haven't read the book. But you know... I don't really want to. I'd much rather read something stimulating than a treatise by some disenchanted intellectual about how I'm too plugged in to my computer.