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In registering the domain name, jsyantiss.com, posting, and maintaining this site, it is my considered and fully devoted intention to contribute what I can to fostering an affection and passion for the English language. In my use of that term, I ardently ignore, indeed completely reject, what has come to be accepted as modern journalism, and the lack of standards found in late 20th century-and-following, prose, both fiction and nonfiction. People understand so little of what others say, because we use the bare minimum of words actually available, rarely use them properly, and almost always mispronounce them. Our human society is so bent, willy-nilly, upon racing through and shortcutting everything undertaken, including basic communication between individuals, to say nothing of groups, that established meanings, and even a common pronunciation, are disregarded almost purposefully, as if speaking jargon and unintelligible dialect somehow gives one identity and power. The process begins in grade school as secret little slang words and phrases, and then refined in adulthood as slurred, clipped, twisted vernacular, sometimes so severe that people from other regions have great difficulty in comprehending single syllables. We have the Baahston tea cant, "ebonics," Southern "hick," Western twang, New Yawkese, and more. One should learn and use as many words as is humanly possible, use them as they are defined in standardized unabridged dictionaries, and as properly pronounced as is mortally attainable.
I fullly comprehend and accept the fact that the audience which I will actually reach, and, therefore, to which I direct myself, is limited—it always has been, and always shall be—to those who actually wish to attain something my great-grandmother, Georgia Gardner Johns, would have called "refinement."
Before someone screams "elitism," I should point out that she was born in 1874, and, along with several of her sisters, attended college in a day when few women went beyond grammar school, if finishing that primary educational milestone. Indeed, one sister, Stella Aiken, went on to be the first female judge in the Southeastern United States. Also, incidentally, the word elite is defined, by Webster's Unabridged (even in the Third New International edition) as "the choice or best of anything considered collectively": something I would hope that anyone would wish for one's self, and certainly anyone else for whom one cared.
That being said, it also must be acknowledged that the number of those, relative to the entire population, who so wish, is miniscule. The widely held opinion that everyone should "go to college," a phenomenon arising in the latter half of the 20th century, simply does not correspond with the desires, goals, aspirations of many people; nor does it allow or provide for the many necessary activities and duties of common life that, at best, do not require that kind of education, and, at worst, causes those who do not possess the type of aptitude and talents for it to pursue a program of life preparation, counterproductive to their own needs. Many people, both men and women, are gifted with a great ability to create or fix things with their hands, such as master automobile mechanics, master carpenters, cabinet makers, master electricians, master plumbers; the list goes on and on, including truck drivers, industrial divers, steel or iron workers, brick masons, and on ad infinitum.
[To be continued]