Language Deterioration Cont.

Well folks, I had originally planned on coming home yesterday and continuing on yesterday's post. But some great news!

I was propositioned to join a professional Latin Jazz band! I was doing a gig on the Mall, a one-time thing with a band I used to play in, and then right afterwards three guys come up to talk to me. One starts talking to me in Portuguese because I sang Samba de uma nota só (One Note Samba) in Portuguese, and then these two guys come up to me to ask me if I want to join their band! And then it turns out they speak Spanish and I speak Spanish so we really hit it off! I spent the day with these two other musicians talking about jazz. One of the guys--I'll call him Renaldo--writes songs too. His brother (I'll call him Ignacio) and him are very tight and so I will be looking forward to being part of the group! We have already started trading song ideas.

Next thing I know it's dinner time and I went with my piano teacher to see some Jazz crooning, Grady Tate. It was great but man was I sleepy with his smooth voice. My piano teacher said he's like a glass of cognac. I've never had cognac (or any alcohol for that matter) but hey, it's pretty cool that I can experience drunkenness without drinking through music. When we drove home she said, "I feel like I'm DUI, driving under the influence!" It was great and it was perfect timing 'cause that was the kind of singing I was thinking for this song I'm writing and needed to hear some good crooning so that I could really feel out the style for my song.

So that is why I didn't come back to finish my post.

You can really start to see how ridiculous the claim of language deterioration is when you read complaints from a long time ago. My linguistics professor once told me she came across an essay about how teachers had started to use "you" instead of "thou" with their students, and if even teachers couldn't choose the correct pronoun, what about the students, and if teachers were making such a huge linguistic blunder, what was education coming to? But nowadays we don't even think of using "you" as being incorrect, in fact that is the pronoun we use. So really, all that language deterioration those of you among the older generations are cringing at--that is the language of the future. Just like your grandparents probably cringed at the fact that you used "access" as a verb, and yet now no one even thinks about it, one day no one will even think about if it is more correct to say "between you and me" or "between you and I."