“The proper frame of mine,” being charged with a “mister meaner,” referring to an “Ivory League School,” complaining that a roommate was from “another dementian,” the school was in “secession year round,” “taken for granite,” and becoming “pregnant on that fetal night” were just a few of James Courter’s examples in his July 10 article of The Wall Street Journal.
Courter had recently retired from teaching composition to college freshman. His charge is that today’s young people don’t read. As a result, they sometimes have hilarious notions of how the written language represents what they hear.
We can only imagine what the English language writings will look like generations from now when young people make spelling shortcuts in their texting and if the decreasing trend to read continues.
