When I wrote in my first blog about "purity of language" I was wistfully considering a time when we simply wrote or spoke with clarity and carefulness. Too much of today's speaking and writing is rife with errors of spelling and grammar and, additionally, abused by wasted words and an unwillingness, it seems, to check and re-check for possible errors.

Let me give one example of the latter, then a couple of entries illustrating the former.

On today's "opinion/editorial" section of Yahoo News there is a link to an article with this title:

"For Obama, Taxes Are About Fairnes" (exact duplication, italics mine). When you click on link to the actual Wall Street Journal article, the highlighted word is spelled correctly. My point is simply that, even among major media outlets, there is little attempt to be careful about spelling and word choice. Perhaps there are not enough proofreaders working for Yahoo or those who are employed are not being alert.

The wasting of words most often comes in the form of "fillers". They abound everywhere, but especially in verbal communication. "Um", "uh", "like" and "you know" are most frequently chosen when, if we were thinking of clarity in our conversations or speeches, we would be better served, as would our hearers, if we thought through what we wanted to say prior to opening our mouths to utter such nonsense. As an example, (and the use of this example does not mean to indicate that Democrats are more prone to such waste than Republicans) today I heard a clip of a speech given about two weeks ago by Mr. Obama which lasted approximately 40 minutes and contained 7 and one-half minutes of "um" and "uh" and "you know" phrases.

What I long for is clarity of language (purity, if you're a purist) and an honest attempt to screen our words before they are put down on paper or on the internet or before they are uttered, never to be retrieved.

Any thoughts waiting to be expressed with clarity and carefulness, minus the fillers?

Is it too late to make a difference?

My new blog will focus exclusively on the decline of written and verbal communication skills. It is painfully obvious to most of us who have lived more than half a century that spelling and grammar mistakes abound in today's media in its varied forms. One prime example of a once-proud form of media that is now rife with error is the local newspaper. My town's weekly entry is not immune and I am sure you have grimaced when you have read your nearby edition. In a recent week's copy of our neighborhood happenings it took little effort to eyeball two separate errors in the spelling of the name of a music group set to perform in our fair city. Diamond Rio appeared as: Dimond Rio,
and Diamon Rio.
My query for us who want purity of language in our culture is whether there is any hope. Are we to throw up our hands in defeat? Is there even a small chance that the situation media-wide can improve? Is our educational system to blame? Are parents at fault? Is it a combination of factors that has brought us to the point where we shamelessly rely on spell-check and no longer consider using a dictionary or thesaurus for words with which we may be unfamiliar?
Please respond with your valuable input, with examples of the all-too-common mistakes, with insight into any glimmer of hope you see on the horizon. My grave concern is that we may be on the edge of an eternal black hole created by the thumbs of texters and the brainless skulls of editors/reporters/commentators and their ilk.