Grammar Fossil: Put me in a museum

Take me back to Ol' St. Deroin

Not many people choose to vacation in Nebraska, and even though it's my native state, I have to admit that my time there is spent largely with family and not spent looking for things that tourists might find interesting. (Scoffers, please note: Nebraska offers more than the I-80 Platte River Valley corridor, but you'd have to drive a ways to get there.)

Presented with a few spare minutes, however, after a cousin's August wedding this year, my wife and I decided to visit Indian Cave State Park, just outside Auburn, Neb., on the Missouri River. Keep in mind this is the forested, hilly Nebraska that most visitors have never or will never see.

In the park, Nebraska historians have recreated the 1860s village of St. Deroin, which was one of the first white settlements in the state. In the "new" old St. Deroin, several craftspersons -- a la Colonial Williamsburg -- show tourists how they survived in the woods and on the rolling banks of the Missouri River.

Some make beeswax candles, some brew lye soap, some forge horseshoes, and another ties whisk brooms. All sell the products to tourists.

The last person we visited sat quietly in a one-room schoolhouse on a stiflingly hot August afternoon. Alas, she had no crafts to sell, just some advice on the proper conjugations of the verbs lie and lay.

Upon returning to Fort Collins, I realized I was that old prairie woman in the schoolhouse. As I read the "internets" every day, and as I read increasingly sloppy print publications around town, I know now that my ilk are as anachronistic as the beeswax molder or the whisk-broom maker at Indian Cave.

And for you Fort Collins residents, here's the obligatory beer analogy:

Sure, there are people in the world who create small-batch craft beers, and those beers taste good and have a cult following among the faithful. But the vast majority of people in the U.S. sidle up to a Bud Light when they turn on "American Idol." The rest of us are just a bunch of special-interest loonies.

And that's the path of the English language over the past decade. As instant text messaging and blog posting become more prevalent and allow Americans to further ignore the basic tenets of precision and conciseness in writing, the more we move away from effective communication among the varied social classes, ethnicities and other differences that sometimes separate us.

In part, the problem lies with an educational system and parents who see writing as different and separate from precision. We're constantly told that someone can be a good writer despite not knowing how to spell, that creativity alone constitutes good writing.

Writing, however, relies on a three-legged stool of passion (creativity), precision (grammar, usage, mechanics) and patience (editing, over and over). And we tend not to teach that enough across the curriculum and at every level of education.

Luckily, I'm getting older, though, and as I age, the opportunities beyond traditional education should become greater for me. I'm looking forward to a ripe old age holed up in a vintage 20th-century big-box high school lovingly re-created at Colonial Leavittown or Smoky Hill State Park, chalk in ditto-stained hand, lecturing about the virtues of a properly punctuated compound sentence.

If you visit me there, please be kind and leave a tip in the jar.