All My Friends Are Plural

I finally made the switch from English. Now, I speak, like, American and stuff.

What? Get out. Like, you too?

Dude. That's, like, trippy.

What are doing to ourselves? We've been given this fine, rich, beautiful language, and we're all, like, so trashing it and stuff!

And why would we want to make things more difficult? Heaven knows, good old across-the-big-pond English is hard enough, without our American attempts to creatively balkanize it. I mean, let's face it. You can't learn English; you have to memorize it. Yes, there are rules, but for every rule, there are, like, 116 exceptions, and exceptions to those exceptions. And the exceptions have no pattern; they make no sense at all.

I can ask for "a hot dog," but I'm supposed to recall "an historical moment." No! No, I won't do it. Shut, like, up and stuff.

Is it "this is a group?" Or "these are a group?" Depends on who(m) you ask. Both are allowed...sometimes. But you can get tossed out of very nice restaurants for saying "the group are here," especially if it are (or they is) a group of people with tongue tattoos.

Men buy a pair of pants, but women buy one bra (some, not even that many). We don't cut our grasses, or get our hairs cut, but we brush our teeth, unless we have tongue tattoos. (If we floss our teeth, that qualifies as an historic moment.)

Pronunciation's no walk in an park, either. Here, the rules just flat give up. When faced with pronunciation, the rules just whip out the rice mat and commit ceremonial suicide. It all simply has to be memorized.

You might think spelling would offer some kind clues to pronunciation. Yeah, right. Consider this list, out loud, unless you're standing by yourself in front of a psychiatrist: thought, though, through, tough, bough, ought, drought.

See what I mean? It's just cruel. I don't know how such nonsense happened, but obviously there was a committee involved.

And then there's the issue with people's surnames. Some seem plural, some not. Why? I have friends with last names like Jones and Williams, but I have other friends with last names like Carter, Johnson, Landau-Smythe, and one old college roommate who had to change his to "Doe." (well, he told us he had to) Why the difference? What, please, are the rules? Have you ever met anyone named Tom Jone? Or Ted William? And you've probably never met anyone named Jimmy Carters or Don Johnsons, either, although Don's cousin, Howard, runs a pretty nice hotel chain.

Again - why? Someone needs to look into this. Some vocabulary aficionado needs to take charge, maybe apply for a federal research grant, if the government has any money left after funding all that vital, economy-stimulating research on the effects of cocaine on the sex habits of monkeys.

If you need to locate a vocabulary aficionado (literal translation: that kid in grade school who ate lots of lunches by himself), just grab a crossword puzzle and stand upwind. They are intensely fond of crossword puzzles, especially if they're masochistic aficionados, or don't have, like, jobs and stuff.

Crossword fans are champions of the "synonym." (literal translation: trying to impress women by saying "Fancy an eft, mon cheri?" instead of "Hey babe, ever eat a salamander?") Crossword fiends can quickly be spotted simply by waiting for them to start twitching. In any standard social situation, just casually employ some common word, and wait. It won't take long. The crosswordiacs are so full of synonyms that they can't stand it until they let one fly.

Crossword puzzles provide four major benefits to mankind:

1) They provide single people with an instant dinner companion.

2) They provide crossword-o-philes with the opportunity to use words that just don't come up that often, like "snood" and "aglet" and "eft" and "permanent tax cut."

3) They allow people to smile and call their boss an idiot without getting fired, simply by taking advantage of synonyms they've picked up from working crossword puzzles, such as "ament" or "jack-pudding" or "gobe-mouches" or "inscrutablix" or "mooncalf" or "clueless quasi-literate pond scum" or "ego-emasculating corporate troll." (literal translation: I hope, someday, I catch you unaware and confused in a dark alley, you career-mangling credit-sucking-vampire)

4) They serve as a magnet to attract members of an odd cult, who see you working a crossword puzzle in restaurants and other public places, walk right up, and utter the same, secret, arcane, cult pass-phrase: "You do them things? I can't do them things."

If you're already a crossword addict, you probably know that the ones posted daily in the New York Times gets progressively harder, from Monday to Sunday. Monday's is clever and challenging, Sunday's is vicious and sadistic. If the New York Times' weekly crossword puzzles were a collection of scary monsters, they might line up something like this:

Monday: Godzilla

Tuesday: Lorena Bobbit

Wednesday: Dick Cheney

Thursday: that guy at the grocery who stands in front of the canned vegetables, bitterly muttering at somebody you can't see

Friday: Hannibal Lector

Saturday: your dentist, if he was insane, and full of drugs, and had convinced himself that you killed his favorite dog, named Dick Cheney

Sunday: Rahm Emanuel

If you're not yet a crossword fan, let me give you a little tip before you take the plunge. The people who create crossword puzzles are very, very evil (sadistic, ruthless, career politician). They are a vile coven of lunatic literati with a laser-like focus on finding puns, obscure word usage and archaic cross-references. They live to dream up brutally-obtuse hints that are so evil that any polite Romance Language nation would quickly queue them for religious excommunication.

And the most vile transgression of the crossword puzzle-maker is the dreaded invention known as the "var." This little nastiness involves the crossword's creator just making up words. Just. Making. Them. The. Heck. Up.

As a seasoned crossworder, you understand that "var" means "misspelled." So this means that the puzzle's author has intentionally included some incorrectly-spelled word, just so it would fit in their ghastly game grid. That's just wrong.

But that's not enough for these dark Crossword-Puzzle-Creating Spawn. Nay, nay. The spawn take it a step further, coming up with clues like "ancient Indo-American canoe used between 5 and 6pm, but only by one-armed aboriginal Leopard God priests named 'Ngobo al Corsair' (var)."

There ought to be a law.

So let's save English, America. Let's all get together (collaborate, cooperate, join forces) and clean up our act (succeed, win, bring home the bacon, snootily reject lots of other people). Let's not lose this precious gift (endowment, kindness, inheritance, out-of-control generational-theft welfare).

And if you'd like to read more about the future of language in America, linea dos, por favor.