Up Sucker Creek

Up Sucker Creek
Photo Courtesy of the Lake Oswego Library

Monday, May 16, 2022

The death of English grammar

And clarity of thought.

Grammar is being trashed and butchered in schools these days and instead of students mangling the “King’s English” with slang, poorly placed commas, incorrect apostrophes and mixed tenses, it’s the educators who are doing the dirty work.  

I used to think the reason grammar wasn’t being taught to my kids in the ‘90s was that teachers were too lazy and didn’t like the discipline of following form, or else they had never been taught the importance of using language to communicate thoughts clearly.  

Now I think that the point of not teaching proper language is to make it easier to garble the meaning of words so that clear thinking is impossible.  By constantly changing the meanings of words and phrases, academics and elites can maintain control over who and what is considered correct at any given time.  Standard English just gets in the way.  

If a boy is a he and a girl is a she, how can they convince us that he or she is they?  


For a list of over 100 pronouns and their usage, see the Free Dictionary.




New York Post

Kiel, Wisconsin school district charges kids for using wrong pronouns

A Wisconsin school district has filed sexual harassment complaints against three middle schoolers for calling a classmate by a wrong pronoun.

The school district in Kiel, a city of 3,600 residents, has charged the three eighth-graders at the Kiel Middle School with sexual harassment after an incident in April in which the students refused to use “they” to refer to a classmate who had switched pronouns a month before the alleged incident, according to reports.

“I immediately went into shock,” she continued in an interview with FOX 11. “I’m thinking sexual harassment? That’s rape, that’s inappropriate touching, that’s incest. What has my son done?”

“I received a phone call from the principal …forewarning me, letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son,” said Rosemary Rabidoux, whose 13-year-old son Braden is one of the students charged with sexual harassment.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is defending the accused students, and claims that misuse of pronouns is not covered by Title IX, the US Education Department’s statute that protects people from discrimination based on sex in education.

“Title IX sexual harassment typically covers things like rape, dating violence, quid pro quo sexual favors — really egregious stuff,” WILL’s deputy counsel Luke Berg told the network. “There’s nothing even remotely close to that alleged in this case.”

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