Story of the Day 3/ 25/ 2009

I am so old that the language I grew up with is no longer spoken.
It has joined Latin and Aramaic and some other no longer spoken tongues.

I found this out, today.
Oh sure, I’d had an inkling that I was dated.
I understood that bad was good.
I know that twitter doesn’t mean what birds do, anymore.
I even know how to Google someone. My friend Cindie taught me that skill.
Oh , yes, and I know all about surfing the net from personal experience, even though I have never even stood on a surf board.

But, that was all just…I don’t’ know , “slang”? Something I could snicker at, politely , behind the backs of my teenagers, knowing that the day would come when their children would be teaching them interesting new verbs.
But then , I read all about the death of my native language in my daughter’s textbook, today.

The language I grew up with never , ever, ever had anything called a “progressive” tense.
This new language conjugates verbs into three of them- past progressive, present progressive and future progressive.
It was bad enough when they relabeled verbs participles.
My daughter came home and had to identify the participle phrases in her homework. Apparently, an Ivy League education did NOT produce a literate adult, in my case.
Or , at least, not one who had any idea what the F…. a participle phrase was.
Okay, so I was only accidentally an Ivy leaguer, but you shouldn’t hold it against me that I hadn’t realized the college I’d applied to was one- and had never even heard the name of it until a teacher told me that I needed to apply there. I thought it was a state college…...

But this?

I suppose I will now be reduced to grunting nouns and adjectives without the benefit of any verbs- since I no longer recognize one when I see it.
Next, I suppose they will take my prepositions away.
And then……

So, unless , I can locate a small island somewhere where English is still spoken……