You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (8 page)

W
e’re becoming a nation of illiterates. Ask any group of businesspeople who read a lot of job applications to name their biggest single complaint, and chances are they’ll tell you they’ve gained weight since college, even though back then they ate pizza and drank beer all the time.

But if you clarify that you are asking them about the job applications, chances are they’ll tell you that young people today have terrible writing skills. They don’t know the rules of grammar or punctuation, they can’t spell, they use tiny, unreadable fonts that look like bacteria and they’re always texting each other pictures of their private parts, which is not directly related to their writing skills but, dammit, what is
wrong
with these kids?

Who is to blame for this illiteracy? I think that we in the older generation—the parents who raised these young people—have to look in the mirror and, painful as it is, face the culprit: a combination of factors, including the Internet, reality television, “hip-hop,” global climate change and Starbucks.

But whatever the cause, it’s a big problem because writing is a crucial life skill. If you’re a recent college graduate and you send a poorly written résumé to potential employers, they’re going to throw it straight into the trash. Whereas if your résumé is well written and error free, the odds are very good that they’re still going to throw it into the trash, because the job market sucks. But they throw the well-written résumés away a little later.
That’s
the group you young people want to strive for.

“But,” I hear you whining in unison, “isn’t grammar hard and boring?”

No, English grammar is
not
“hard and boring.” That is a myth. All you have to do is learn a few simple, logical rules. Once you’ve mastered those, all you have to do is learn nineteen trillion totally illogical exceptions to the rules because otherwise you will sound like an idiot. So reflecting back on the opening sentence of this paragraph, we see that English grammar is, in fact, hard and boring. We’d better get started!

Step one is to learn:

THE PARTS OF SPEECH

The parts of speech are sometimes called the building blocks of grammar, because most of them are rectangular. The main parts of speech are:

Nouns

A noun is a person, place or thing. For example, consider this sentence:

As far as actors,
Leonardo DiCaprio
is no Marlon Brando.

In this example
,
“Leonardo DiCaprio” is a noun because he is a person whereas “Marlon Brando” is not because he died in 2004.

Exception:
Zombies, despite being technically dead, can be nouns when used grammatically in lymphatic phrases, such as:

Help!
Zombies
is eating my spleen!

Pronouns

Pronouns are words that stand in for nouns when for some reason you don’t want to come right out and say the name of the noun:

 


• You better not let
  you know whom
  get a load of that hickey.
  

 


• I’m not saying who dropped the air biscuit during the State of the Union speech, but his
  initials are Joe Biden
  .
  

 


• After seven straight hours on the back of Darnell’s Harley, Marge was feeling a little funky
  down there
  .
  

 

Verbs

Verbs are words that describe actions.

 


• What is all that
  ruckus
  ?
  

 


• You are
  darned tooting
  .
  

 


• Don’t make me come over there and
  open up a can of whupass
  on your ass
  .
  

 


• Dang
  it!
  

 


• When Vernell found the duck sauce on his Barcalounger, he like to threw a [ke
  conniption fit
  .
  

 


• I would describe those actions as
  very unusual
  .
  

 

Exception:
If no actual action takes place, the sentence does not need a verb, as in these examples:

 


• Francine watched the entire 2010 season of
  Cake Boss
  .
  

 


• The pitcher threw a no-hitter.
  

 


• The president met with congressional leaders to discuss ways to improve the economy.
  

 

Adjectives

Adjectives are words that tell you something about a noun:

 


• For a person of his stature,
  Leonardo DiCaprio has quite a large head
  .
  

 


• In the 1991 movie
  Critters 3
  , Leonardo DiCaprio
  plays a young man who locks his mean stepfather in a room with space creatures that eat him
  .
  

 


• The letters in “Leonardo DiCaprio”
  can be rearranged to spell “A ripe raccoon dildo.”
  

 

Adverbs

Adverbs are words that end in “ly,” such as
personally
,
frankly
,
manly
and
ugly
. They are used to form parts of sentences, as follows:

 


• Four people died from wings-related injuries inflicted during a
  family
  function at Chuck E. Cheese.
  

 


• Bernice put a
  doily
  over the hamster doots.
  

 


• Holy moly
  , there’s mice in this lasagna.
  

 

Prepositions

Prepositions are words such as
in
,
of
,
to
,
from
,
around
,
about
,
aforementioned
and
yonder
. They introduce prepositional phrases, which are used mainly to write song lyrics:

 


• I’ve been
  through the desert on a horse with no name
  .
  

 


• I got passion
  in my pants
  and I ain’t afraid to show it.
  

 


• In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
  , baby, don’t you know that I’m loving you.
  

 


• She’ll be coming
  ’round the mountain
  when she comes. / She’ll be coming
  ’round the mountain
  when she comes. / She’ll be coming ’round the mountain, she’ll be coming
  ’round the mountain
  , / She’ll be coming
  ’round the mountain
  when she comes.
  

 


• Round round get around
  / I get around / Yeah / Get
  around round round
  I get around.
  

 


• Since you put me down there’s been owls pukin’
  in my bed
  .
  

 

• ut me downquote>
  Who put the ram
  in the rama lama ding dong
  ?