"The Spoken Word!"

I like watching some of the "judge shows" on television. I sometimes wish these judges were serving on our State and Federal Supreme Courts. I think my favorite is "Judge Judy", followed by "Judge Joe Brown". These two people exhibit great intelligence and humor on the bench. Joe Brown constantly sends a message of responsibility for your actions, and being a "real man" instead of a "poser". Judge Judy is as sharp a reader of people as there is today; she can spot a liar a mile away! I love it when she says "You're not as smart as I am, and you never will be!", whenever she is confronted by some wise guy who thinks he can "put one over on her". Another thing I like about Judge Judy is her persistent correction of people's use of the English language. She is not much of a fan of "street language". The more I listen to people conversing, the more I appreciate those who properly speak. Terms like "noImean!"(do you know what I mean) and "ainnothang"(it is nothing) do very little to inspire an image of intelligence to the listener.

Where does all of this pseudo-English come from? Obviously, somebody in our school system has dropped the ball. Our children have been led to believe it is better to sound like a thug, than an educated person. Our music industry can take a portion of the blame for this.

Another reason we are having this language degeneration is that NOBODY READS ANYMORE! I don't mean a newspaper; I mean books, real books! Hemingway, Hawthorne, Steinbeck and Tolstoy; authors who had command of the language, who forced the reader to understand cogent thought, authors who have been all but lost on our current generation because of "street poets" who can't put a sentence together without a thesaurus or dictionary have taken the place of intelligent writers. We are seeing the "dumbing down" of our children because we want the acceptance of "street-wise speech".

I live in small town America, and I hear "ghetto" language from kids who have never seen any building higher that a barn; but they want to emulate the garbage that has been fed to them by a society of low expectations.

As parents, and as Americans, we should be enraged by this. We used to take pride in the well spoken word, and the educational level of our society. We have taken achievement and turned it into guilt, and we have taken eloquence and turned it into a lost art. My Dad said "If you sound stupid, people will assume that you are." We need to put some pressure on our educational system and our entertainment industry, or we will end up with a "generation of illiterates"!