A comma in the air

Spring is sprung

The grass is riz

I wonder where the flowers is?

Ahhh grammar. 

I've been thinking about that classic Archie comic joke quite a bit lately, and not just because the first dandelions and tree buds are finally beginning to show themselves here in Southern Ontario.

I've rambled on here before about the rampant disrespect of language found in the majority of English speaking cultures. Usually, this is a bad thing. The fact that lol, btw, and ur now basically qualify as words is upsetting. That said, there are other new words that I'm quite partial to - google (as a verb) and frugalista, for instance. In such cases, the English language is better described as malleable than disrespected, at least in my humble opinion.

Of course, new or abbreviated versions of words/phrases really have little to do with the proper use of grammar (or lack thereof.) Or do they? 

I can honestly say that I never had a formal English grammar lesson until I took a post graduate course in copy editing two and a half years ago. Everything I know about grammar and sentence structure I learned from reading, and taking note of the corrections made to my papers by teachers. Taking Latin, and learning about that language's grammatical structure also helped. 

I'm told that this is a vast change from how it was for previous generations, and gather that the education system gradually focused less and less on the skill of writing over the years. Is it any wonder that many kids today think it's alright to use "words" like ppl in their essays? I'm not necessarily condoning texting, etc, but the mere fact that this is how the kids are communicating amongst themselves certainly doesn't strike me as the root of the problem.

Yet there's a difference, I think, between being lazy about language and having fun with it. A couple days ago I had a conversation with a coworker about a high school student who referred to an apostrophe as "a comma in the air." She was horrified that this girl did not use the appropriate term for the symbol, but I wasn't so sure. Considering a lot of adults seem to lack an understanding of where to use an apostrophe in the first place, at least this girl knows how to make something possessive. Plus, I for one kind of enjoy the phrase "comma in the air." It makes the otherwise rather boring and severe punctuation mark seem so cheerful and light heated - almost like it's floating along on a warm summer breeze...