Say wha!?

Yesterday, May 20th, was Eliza Dolittle Day, the day set aside each year to celebrate all the glory that is Eliza Dolittle and George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion and the movie My Fair Lady. No, I hadn't heard of it before yesterday either.

Theatre geeks and Audrey Hepburn fans will remember Eliza Dolittle as the Cockney flower girl taught to speak "proper" English by Professor Henry Higgins in order to pass as a duchess and win a bet for the good professor. Hearing about Eliza Dolittle Day on NPR yesterday made me start thinking about language: how it changes and when the "improper" or slang becomes "proper" and standard. PBS online has a great piece on language change, The Truth About Language.

This year it became okay to "unfriend" someone, especially if they became your most recent "frienemy." Last night I went online and bought a "groupon," a one-day only coupon sold exclusively online in groups (except that you don't have to have a group or purchase as a group, you can buy just one, which seemed odd to me). Last Saturday I sent off a "slice-of-life" story for a contest. The word limit was 1,500 words, which makes it too long to be a "short-short" or "flash fiction" but, to those holding the contest, was not to be mistaken with a traditional short story.

It seems like life is finite, objects are finite (even though we arrange, deconstruct, and reconstruct them in new ways all the time) but language has the potential of the infinite, the limitlessness (Is that even a word?). Case in point, recently I joked with my husband that I often felt nervous on social network sites like Facebook. Do I accept a friend request or ignore it? Are my comments clever enough? Why do I feel anxious when no one "likes" my status update? I coined this feeling Social Network Anxiety Disorder or SNAD, only to find out a few days later that SNAD has been diagnosed already, at least by sociologists if not psychologists.

My point is this. I may not like it when people drop there "g"s on words, as in "fixin' to" and "makin' a" or when "converse," as in "She and I conversed about the subject" becomes "conversate," as in "Yeah, we conversate." It's like fighting the tide. I even read in William Zinsser's classic on writing, On Writing Well, that's its okay to end a sentence in a preposition, lest one sound snooty.

So, I guess it's like this, yo. Say wha!? 'liza Dolittle Day waz yesterday? Na! Fer real? Damn! I gotta friend her. Strait up!