Recently a staff member of one a federal office holder
called to find out if I’d received a news release the office had sent out. The
conversation went something like this:
“I’m calling to find out if you guys got the news release we
sent you.”
We did.
“Awesome.”
After hanging up, I suddenly had a vision of my second-grade
teacher, Mrs. Curnutt. A formidable woman, at least to a 7-year old, Mrs.
Curnutt was determined that her class would learn to be civilized, if not
well-versed in arithmetic and language rules.
If she were alive today, I’m pretty certain Mrs. Curnutt
would have sent to the cloakroom any student of hers who said “you guys” and
“awesome.” When she was holding forth in her classroom, she waged war on kids
who said “huh?”
“What do you mean, ‘huh’?” she would say. “There’s no such
word as huh. Pull a pig’s tail and it says uh-huh.”
She once asked if anyone in the class knew how to spell that
word she insisted didn’t exist. By age 7, I’d begun to devour such comic books as
Little Iodine and Nancy and Sluggo, and I’d seen the word used in those books.
But I also knew it was safer to pull that pig’s tail than it would be to tell Mrs.
Curnutt I could spell the word.
As her students advanced out of her classroom, other
teachers in higher grades also tackled the use of ain’t. We retaliated with “we
ain’t supposed to say ain’t.”
The teachers reinforced their grammar drillings with the
notion that anyone who spoke those words would always come across in public as
uneducated, foolish. We’d never amount to much in life if we used those words.
I imagine that besides being a party faithful, or the
offspring of one, it takes a certain amount of smarts to get a job in a government
official’s office in Washington, D.C. I imagined the young lady on the other end of the phone as a
gum-snapping Millennial in yoga pants whose phone is smarter than she is. But
maybe Mrs. Curnutt was wrong. Maybe how one speaks doesn’t make one appear less
than awesome.
So, what do you guys think, huh?
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