Jonathan+O's+OpEd+Article

Jon Oyan’s OpEd Article about the Random Anomalies of the English Language and Other Things, Such as the 24-Hour Day
(Talk about a mouthful) media type="file" key="jono-muckraker-2011.mp3" align="center" It’s about 9:30 now, and I’ve just sat down to write this “muckraking” article. Before you object to my procrastination, in my defense, I knew I was going to write about this before I sat down. I just had tennis practice until after 4, and after I had waited (hours) for Greg to get out of the shower, I got cleaned up and left home for something EDUCATION related. Yes, something of educational merit – the college fair at Seaside Park. I am glad I went, my future is certainly worth it, but I also hate the fact that I let my mother force me to go despite my homework. And to think that people say we have free will… After a “short” sampling of the many obscure colleges of America, we left Seaside Park at around 8:30 and picked up dinner: Urbane Café. I must say, it was a good choice. After all this, I got home and went straight to the dinner table at 9:00. You, dear reader, may have been in this sort of situation on multiple occasions before. School hits you hard until three o’clock (or about 4:30 if you play sports), and then you go home to get backhanded by life, leaving little time to do important things such as homework/guitar playing/facebooking (and I did just make facebook a verb). Yes, reader, I see you smiling now. I’m glad we’re on the same page. All of this has inspired me to have little patience for the shortness of the normal day. 24 hours seem much shorter when you spend (hopefully) around a third of that time asleep, more than a third of the time locked up in the secret penitentiary called school, and about 1/5 of that time waiting for your sibling to relinquish the shower. There are no design flaws in the Earth’s exact placement around the sun, and I know that this planet’s orbit speed makes our climate hospitable (perfectly), but on days like these, I wish the spinning would slow down. Imagine how life would be altered if we lived accustomed to a 30 hour day! I almost like the ring to that. We’d all be able to sleep in on school nights, and we’d get more time for school business to be mixed with a little bit of pleasure.

Nevertheless, I am unlikely to wake up one morning to a 30 hour day. This leaves me in the sad state I am in now, where I have remembered what I was actually going to write this article about: the English Language. I apologize in advance to the AP teachers that may find this disturbing.

English, English, English… Where do I begin? We have a love-hate relationship. My cognitive processes operate on English, sure, but it can be such a pain at times, especially at the previously described situation I am in, where proper grammar and speeling evade my tired mind. Yes, English, you are my bane, in your bizarreness and nonsensicalness. I like Spanish, I think. It’s all a pattern. Spanish class is easy for me because once you get the basic patterns down, all that is left is the vocabulary. In Spanish, there are defined verbs for first, second, and third person situations. It’s all quite clean, in a sense. But then, we get back to English, which is slightly messy and understandably difficult for foreigners and even native speakers to acquire. Honestly, who made up all the rules? Take the word “moose” for example. The word “goose” describes only one of the white fowl. The word “geese” is plural. It comes, granted, that the plural for “moose” must be “meese”. Obviously, that is a lie, since my computer’s spell check is questioning that word. The correct word is actually “moose,” again. Still, the thought is, “really?” What a weird tongue I am studying.

My last gripe with the language is something called a semicolon. I don’t usually have grammar errors when I’m typing, but if I do it is over a misplaced comma that a semicolon should be replacing.

If you read this essay closely, you will find an overall lack of semicolons. I generally avoid them. They follow weird rules and join incomplete clauses to complete clauses, and sometimes complete phrases to complete phrases, and sometimes not. Such rules are very confused, as well as confusing.

= ; = There it is. The anomaly itself. Seriously, what on earth is a semicolon? It’s like a colon (the punctuation mark, not the body organ) decided to get plastic surgery so that it could have the nose of a comma. It’s like it wanted to be the beginning of a list, while also not wanting to be the beginning of a list, while also wanting to split up a thought or something. I really just cannot comprehend the value of this extraterrestrial punctuation mark. Look at it again….

= ; = = ; = = ; = These things tire me. I think we should, in the American tradition, have a revolution from the English language tyranny and fall away from the semicolon, the instigator of punctuation without rationalization. I don’t know, maybe I’m just rambling…