I guess this is a well meaning response to J-Ho’s most recent myspace hottie feature. She deserved everything that was said about her I’ll bet, but whether myspace is a public forum that warrants the Queen’s English, is up for debate. Still I’m not trying to start an inner blog feud.

My English teacher wife won’t like what I’m gonna say either, and I am counting on A. and Joel to come back at me about this. But the fact is I’m the only white, English major I know who really thinks Ebonics should have been taught and that privileged professor-types complaining about how anyone, let alone poor people, write/speak/think in the name of protecting the integrity of language, should be shot.

As a semi-professional writer, I’m supposed to believe in clarity above all. But clarity is subjective and you have to be ruthless to articulate and capture transient ideas as they make sense from your perspective, not the perspective of grammar nazis.

I catch flack for refusing to be a grammar catholic, but to me the rules of English as practice represent both practical and arbitrary decisions made slowly over the course of thousand of years and only codified roughly 200 years ago by white people you’ve never met. Some of these people were geniuses, some were tools. So it’s not surprising that, at best, our language is a strangely wired system – stunning and terrible in its complexities and peculiarities, not unlike a schizophrenic.

Now it’s an often repeated HST fact, “that to life outside the law, you must be honest,” so I say this with a clean conscious: traditional usage doesn’t make for better thoughts and clinging to strunk&white, which i love and keep on my desk like a good nerd, won’t save you. As dialects are slowly being whitewashed out of America, we need “bad” grammar more than ever.

I have been reading “Moby Dick” lately and the phrasing twists don’t seem archaic to me at all, they seem new and exciting. So many not very smart people hiding behind formal grammar and big words. If you go down the Chomsky innate-grammar-mechanism road, then I suspect the mental tools needs to memorize and master grammatical systems are often antithetical to tools needed to create, question, and reinvent language, which is what every writer worth anything aspires to.

English doesn’t respect you. Don’t respect it. Butcher, pummel and break it. Own the fucker and ride it like a giant, wild mutant sea snake. Be excited about crazy slang and new ways of saying things. It’s what Shakespeare, Twain, and Old Dirty would want.