More and more, I find myself surprised at the nonchalant destruction of grammar and syntax in our great language. It seems so prevalent, and it drives me crazy. The most obvious misuse of tense involves inserting the third person single into a sentence when its the third person plural which is called for. Everyone does it these days and it can be heard both on the street and on television. George Bush famously mangled his sentences (there's,.. you know,.. whole terrorists out there that'll try and kill us, you know.. over here)
We were taught (some of us anyway, and I didn't go to Harvard) that nouns like books or terrorists (with an s) are plural and should be used in the third person plural. (i.e. Here are the books.... there are the terrorists) We live in a world where it seems perfectly normal to say:
Here's the books,,, there's the terrorists
instead of the correct: here are the books, and there are the terrorists.
I confess that it drives me CRAZY....
But even worse, people no longer correctly understand the use of direct or indirect objects, and don't even don't really care. So, when I tried to watch a video of an interview with a successful artist (who got an MFA from Yale University b.t.w.), I was astounded by his incoherence. Here is just a fraction of an idea, (and actually, even if his grammar was correct (and his verb tense was right), I still wouldn't have a clue what he was trying to say.)
here it is (verbatim):
the successful artist:"I don't draw,,,, I've always done collage instead of doing drawing ...and,,, photography ... I was looking at this photography book that was a photographer who had went to India and had photographed Indian prostitutes and Indian Brothels and ..ah,,,and the photographer was an American...... and that sort of objectification,... we don't do really do in painting anymore like since Gauguin or something, right,,,ah...but we used to do it,,,but we don't do it in painting anymore so in painting now,,,,, if you see a painting of an Indian woman,,, its a good chance that an Indian woman actually painted it...ah... so I was interested in what we might have lost in painting by rejecting that idea of objectification...
interviewer: mmn...
the successful artist: ah,,, and I guess in painting we have more self-objectification where I make paintings of people just like me....
WTF!
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