Grammar Nazi Diatribe II

I just realized something that's going to spark some profound introspection. It's even scarier than the time I got that email personality quiz that classified me as someone who "tends to look down on others," and I realized they were right, but I'll have to justify that in another post. This is far more urgent because there is a specific bias involved in my disdain.

I noticed that I'm avoiding someone's calls because just hearing her speak (gratefully, I will never have cause to meet her in person) sends my blood pressure soaring. It's not simply because the subject we are doomed to correspond about is an annoying work-related situation that involves one of my most negligent coworkers, who is only negligent because they have no education in the skills needed to resolve the problem, which really isn't their fault. No. This person speaks with an accent, the mark of a race particularly well-known to me, one I've come, through experience, to loathe. I did not start out prejudiced, and I promise you I've fought it every step of the way. It's just been continually drilled home. She's also in a professional position that I feel should be held only by someone truly educated and refined, and I can tell by her speech that she's not. Her linguistic style is that of someone who appears to feel she has a fairly decent grip on a language and so takes no care to improve her use of it, thereby insulting me and anyone else forced to communicate with her in our native tongue. What's even worse to imagine is that English may also be this woman's native tongue, and she doesn't know or care enough to speak it well. I don't mean she should learn perfect collegiate English; I only ask that she learn a higher level of vocabulary than my ten-year-old niece, and pronounce it better than the six-year-old.

I don't consider myself bilingual. The Spanish I speak is limited to slang, insults, profanity, and basic conversation, speech I would not use even in a social situation when polite conversation would be the requisite. I would certainly not use it in a professional transaction. I wouldn't use it unless I was confident that I was effectively communicating at the minimum required level.

Another count against this total stranger is that she sounds so much in voice and grammar like someone I have cause to genuinely despise that I see red before she even gets her stilted, casual greeting out. This may be unjustified, but it's still obvious that she entirely fails to understand that a person's diction causes people to make immediate judgements about them. In a lot of cases those judgements may be correct. Not to mention that she speaks in a tone of authority bordering on bombast, probably a professional practice intended to intimidate me, but she loses all credibility when her grammar goes to Hell and I'm far less afraid than she wants me to be and far more offended than anyone should have to be while in the workplace.

It's not just her. I abhor getting calls from solicitors I can hardly understand. I got so frustrated one time I asked some poor woman "are you calling from the bayou? I can't understand you at all. Can you get someone who speaks English to talk to me?" The same with credit card customer service representatives who sound like they've never set foot outside a thatched hut somewhere tropical. Where are they finding these people? Honestly, I'm all for managed immigration, with the right resources to help them become integrated into American life. I don't care if English isn't the national language of the United States, as long as whoever speaks it to me does it well. I even occasionally have a hard time taking people with southern accents seriously, which proves I can be something of a Grammar Nazi; after all, my paternal ancestry is all about a plantation in Kentucky with lilacs and slaves and all the agricultural accoutrements. I realize it's unjust and rude and I'm working through that. I'm not a white supremacist or member of the Klan or anything like that, either. I just think that if a girl from the styx whose finishing school was Mar Vista (Sea View in English, if you're curious) can successfully communicate with dignity and tact according to the basic rules of grammar, so can everybody else. Tell you what: I'll work on my tolerance, and if they'll work on their English, we'll be meeting halfway. Cooperation is a good thing.