The United States Department of English
While English's democratic nature makes America the brightest beacon for grammatical freedom and scatological opportunity in the world, it also means that our language is shaped, to a great extent, by dickheads. This penile effect has grown substantially in the age of ubiquitous internet access. We are reading less by those who can write, and more by those who cannot. Reading decent English is a prerequisite for learning how to write it, so this shift in balance has left us with a vicious cycle of verbal incompetence. Many of us can still recall a time when the only thing we had to fear was a transposed i and e, or an occasional first-person singular pronoun occurring in the accusative form when it should have been nominative; now we must suffer ur, kewl, and ginormous.
Equally galling are the lame rationalizations that accompany this new coprolexicon. Apologists claim that abbreviations like lol are used for ``efficiency reasons''. There is nothing efficient about replacing structured language with a stream of verbal tics. These are the same people who fuel the $4 billion ringtone industry--efficiency is not their calling card. Beyond a mere indifference to proper spelling, we are witnessing outright orthographic evil: words intentionally misspelled in a feeble pretense of style. These linguistic extremists construe their inability to write properly as creativity, evidence that they have outfoxed the system and defeated the Great Satan of reasonable sentence structure.
There are some among us who feel that we can address this growing threat with education. We can no longer afford this kind of September 10 mentality. Our country is under verbal attack, and the last four years have made it abundantly clear that those who do violence against the English language can penetrate even the highest levels of our government. Our best and brightest can only read ``embarassed'' so many times without imperiling their own spelling. And when was the last time you saw ctenoid spelled correctly? Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form of ``mushroom clowd''.
How do we restore security and verbal integrity to our diction, without endangering the values that make us number one? We must not declare, ``This is right,'' or ``That is right''--that kind of socialist thinking is for our elitist ``friends'' in old Europe with their Académie française and little cars. Instead, we must say, ``This is wrong,'' and hold accountable those who would ignore our usage warnings. For too long, the First Amendment has provided a safe haven for those who hate English. We must take effective action against these enemies of freedom, and send them a clear message: Speak English, or die.
The following sections of this document lay out a plan that addresses many of the threats facing us. We present practical measures that hold dictators responsible for the things they say, and also specify how to respond to written attacks.
| Offense | Means of punishment/execution | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| cuz | Must endure the awkward eye contact of walking down a 100-yard-long hallway with a casual acquaintance approaching from the opposite end. | |
| woot | Fifty lashes with large rubber question mark. | |
| prolly | Mouth stuffed with balls from computer mice. | |
| absotutely | mild crucifixion | |
| ur (as in ``ur the BEST!!!!!'', not ur-concept) | Offender dressed in red, white, and blue jumpsuit, given Rambo hunting knife, dropped by parachute over site of the ancient city of Ur, in southeast Iraq. | |
| soooo | the rack (one turn for each unnecessary o) | |
| lacksadaisical | Offender's joints smashed as necessary to weave limbs into large iron frame in the shape of an S. | |
| anywho | Offender's foot removed and surgically attached to abdomen. | |
| FANTABULOUS (the word or overused uppercase) | elocution | |
| im | Cat's Paw | |
| loose (in place of lose), chose (in place of choose) | Judas Cradle | |
| coinkydink | Heretic's Fork | |
| :) | Sophocles' Stylus | ( 8=# |
| freep | Jingo's Neckerchief | If no American flag is available, a Confederate flag may be safely substituted. |
| ginormous, hunormous, etc. | Offender laid upon ground; volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary stacked atop. | The LD50 for the OED when employed in this manner is sixteen volumes, with only 1% of subjects surviving beyond Unemancipated to Wau-Wau. |
| b4 | Run over by car with vanity license plates reading CUL8RFCKHD. | |
| majorly | Pop rocks and Pepsi (administered directly to stomach by means of a razor-tipped funnel called a Mikey) |
(Despite fashionable railings against the word blog, we feel that it would be unfair to punish those who use it. Though the word is atrocious and should never be used as a verb or spoken aloud, its use can be construed as necessary: weblog is awkward, as is the natural portmanteau wog, for other reasons.)
Be it here resolved, that a ten-year proscription shall be enacted immediately against all use of the ellipsis, as a countersway against its egregious misapplication. Those writers seeking exemption from the moratorium may apply to the DoE stating the tangible hardship caused by it, and the Department may, at its discretion, grant such writers permission to use as many as ten ellipses for the duration of the moratorium, provided: (a) the writer does not use more than two ellipses in any one piece, with the exception of novels and epic poems, which may contain three; and (b) these ellipses are accompanied by sufficient obscenity so as to guarantee that the material in question cannot legally be distributed to minors, whose own punctuation is so easily corrupted.
Violators will be... um... fucked in the ass.
Historical evidence supports the efficacy of such a measure. The text of the motion is taken nearly verbatim from a similar decree of Pope Clement VIII's ``Grammar for a New Centurie'' initiative of 1599. Though Clement did not live to see his dream realized, the initiative's ``tough love'' approach rapidly improved the grammar of the remaining literate population, as demonstrated by the following writing samples.
1599 (pre-initiative):
1607 (post-initiative):
Though it holds unprecedented promise for spreading good words, like avuncular or tmesis, the information superhighway has brought us to a crossroads. We can choose to ignore the forces that seek to destroy our way of speaking, allow the downward spiral of incoherence to continue, and resign ourselves to a future of fear. Or, we can meet the responsibility of defending human liberty against violence and aggression, and confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and insufferable neologisms to America. The choice is clear, and our resolve is inderesolvable.
In addition to reinstating capital punishment for those who excessively use uppercase, we must promote a culture of LIFE: Literacy Is For Everyone. Under LIFE, parents of children who fail to meet minimal literacy standards will be given vouchers that may be redeemed for schooling at a different location, a practice we call extraordinary reeducation. Or, parents may choose to school their children at home; the vouchers are printed on canes for this purpose.
But LIFE is only the beginning. We must put praire back in our school dictionaries. (Applause.) In the cause of human dignity, we must support those whose work exemplifies clarity, and encourage the creation of new faith-based infinitives, like to faithicate and to faithisize. We need to privatize our libraries so that they operate more efficiently. And Americans need to watch what they say, because the Central Intelligibility Agency will be monitoring their pronunciation.
In the years to come, the retirement of many senior novelists will strain the American narrative system. That is why I have submitted to Congress legislation that will allow young writers to shift some of their narration from the outmoded third-person omniscient to personal accounts in the first-person subjective. This legislation also lays out a prescription drug plan for the Beat writers of yesteryear--as well as the neo-gonzo journalists of tomorrow. (Applause.)
A strong America must also defend the sanctity of marriage, as the union of an accented and unaccented syllable. Though we should respect the condemned homoinflectuals seeking to infiltrate this fundamental, dactylic institution of our civilization, we must send activist lexicographers a clear message: marriage is not a spondee, like butt-nut or blowjob.
Our responsibility to English is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. (Applause.)