Who learned you how to spoke? Welcome to another edition of the
not-so-subtle educational column, dedicated to providing the cold
water in the face that you dread but need. The educational
columnist understands that many of you (no need to mention any
names) have forgotten some of the basic rules of grammar and logic
due to sensual overload from mediated forms of experience. This
week’s column will remedy that with a few tips that will have
you writing prose good enough to wipe your nose with.
Grammar is very basic to human communication, and without it you
would not make any sense. For example, the sentence, “I love
it when people gossip on cell phones loudly on a crowded
bus,” has an obvious grammatical error. The word
“love,” when used in the above case, should always be
changed to “hate.” This is known in grammar as the
“imperative antonym substitution.”
Sometimes grammar can be altered given a certain situation.
Suppose you get together with your loved one whom you haven’t
seen in a while. The sentence, “Let’s watch TV,”
commits the standard error of “conditional
inordinates,” a rule which says that any statement including
the phrase “watch TV” must always be supplemented with
a prefixal word “not” if meeting a loved one. The rule
also allows you to place the word “not” in a following
sentence, such as, “Let’s watch TV. NOT!” Another
correction would be replacing “watch TV” with “go
out.” Specific word usage can sometimes come under the rigor
of grammar. The word “own” as in “I own
Radiohead’s music,” is usually incorrect. Some people
mean that they purchased the CD at a store, in which case they
“own” the album, but not the music. The remedy is to
actually “own” the music, to feel it in your body and
sing it in the shower and gesture it like a conductor.
If that hasn’t satiated your grammar hunger for today,
let’s move on to various forms of logic. Logic itself is a
type of grammar, one which allows scientists to discover things.
One particular manifestation of logic can be found in analogies,
which ask you to make relationship distinctions. For example,
“The New York Times is to excellent journalism as the Fox
News Network is to Greta Van Susteren’s cosmetic
surgery.” Another one would be, “Books are to words and
ideas as television is to images and boobs.” Sometimes logic
can be twisted to create fallacies. For example, “The new
“˜Time Machine’ movie kicked ass, and if you don’t
agree, I’ll kick your ass.” This is known as an appeal
to force (argumentum ad baculum”“ you wish I made that up),
not a proper mode of logical argument. This statement could be
remedied with a simple statement, “The new “˜Time
Machine’ sucked.” Another fallacy can be found in this
statement, “Since I have a THX 5.1 Dolby surround sound
system, pumping 1000 watts into my dorm room and can download all
my music from KaZaA, I no longer need to go to music concerts or
continue playing my amateur guitar.” This is the fallacy of
technocracy (argumentum ad geekum”“yes, I made that up). This
dangerous logical error assumes that the purpose of a concert is to
receive mediated forms of entertainment from technology that
proposes to be better than reality, “hyperreality” if
you will. The fallacy can be corrected by simply going to concerts.
Another correction is listening to music on a little one-watt
stereo that costs $10. This compromise fulfills your musical needs
while you wash the dishes and do your homework, as well as reminds
you that a real performance is actually much better and has no
substitution.
However, mediation is still present at concerts. Rock concerts
are loud only because some sound engineer has turned up the volume
on the speakers. MTV has tried to counter this with its
“Unplugged” series, showing various artists without the
crutch of super-techno production values. Of course, MTV is still
television, and therefore remains mediated. The extreme
non-mediated entertainment experience can be easily imitated in
your living room, playing unaccompanied guitar with your scratchy
vocals. Not only does this eliminate the media from your
experience, it is something you create and add to culture. You can
be uploading culture instead of merely downloading it from above.
Don’t you just love how far logic can take you?
Now for the final grammar question: what was the tone of this
columnist? A. Sarcastic. B. Sardonic. C. Sardines. D. Preachy,
Pedantic, Dogmatic, and Elitist. For our last grammar lesson, this
column now concludes with the erroneous “dangling
question.”