Graduates, Welcome to the World of Standard English
In a 2017 article entitled “Shrugging Off the Liberal ‘Resistance’,” Richard Miniter wrote: “American tourists in foreign countries once had the reputation of believing that if they shouted in English loud enough the dumb foreigner standing there with a puzzled look on his face would somehow understand what they were saying.”
Miniter postulated that the “Ugly American” abroad stereotype was being acted out contemporaneously, only at home, in liberals’ angry, ear-splitting, mindless, mind-numbing denunciations of President Donald Trump and the perfectly-normal plurality of American voters who gave the president his significant Electoral College majority.
Today, the left’s verbal assaults continue in a pidginized language unfamiliar to normal Americans to whom liberals condescend and tolerate only for their abilities to do things smugly “superior” progressives cannot do – people such as plumbers, electricians, farmers, mechanics, masons, truck drivers and heavy equipment operators, among many other skilled trades.
Higher education is at least partly to blame. The hard-leftward lurch of faculty and swollen administrations, the gutting of once-strenuous core programs, grade inflation and the addition of soft majors to attract, keep and indebt students have produced millions of college graduates who are far more liberal than previous generations of alumni, but who are often less-educated, incapable of critical thinkingand emotionally-unprepared to cope with the real world.
Don’t scoff: UConn once offered a major in “Puppetry”; New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University has a degree in “Adventure Education”; San Francisco State (where else?) offers one in“Sexuality Studies”; and, at Bowling Green State, undergrads can major in “Popular Culture” – you know, the stuff in which most matriculating teenagers are already fully-immersed.
Many college graduates, undergrads and college-bound kids have been or will be effectively defrauded. Too many drop out or graduate, indebted, with little to show for their experience other than an indoctrination in East/West Coast post-modern liberal group-think and fluency in a corruption of the English language barely recognizable in the normal world they’re joining.
Their alien lexicon expands constantly: “Micro-aggressions,” “trigger warnings,” “cultural appropriation,” “intersectionality,” “safe spaces,” “gender-neutral pronouns,” “white privilege,” “cultural equivalency,” “anti-bias and sensitivity training,” “dog whistles,” “transgenderism,” “oops/ouch rules,” “personal and group affirmation” – the list goes on…
With so many politically-correct classroom behavioral distractions, there’s little time for teaching published knowledge. Indeed, in some “disciplines,” there is little knowledge to teach. Unsurprisingly, many graduates emerge unaware they are under-educated.
Degrees falsely reassure graduates that they’re smarter than non-degreed people having genuine, practical skills. Most older college graduates, especially those holding STEM degrees, simply laugh off campus progressives’ self-absorbed silliness.
The left’s shared “understanding” of many common matters is out of step with most Americans. Their smug sense of superiority is unearned, and their social, cultural and political admonitions go unheeded. Despite the American left’s noisy, angry denunciations of intellectual “inferiors,” the “proles” outnumber them and are too busy working and looking after families, too involved in communities to pay attention to emotional, high-decibel, linguistic solecisms, much less spend time deciphering them.
Graduates, welcome to the world of standard English.
