Freenglish!

The readings for this week (and our class forum discussions) were exceedingly interesting to me—especially in the context of the film Arrival.  For starters, I just wanted to mention the high probability of an *actually* universal language made possible by future technologies that render speech & writing obsolete. Trials with mice, for instance, are already proving that information can be electronically "programmed" into living beings, so it's not too far fetched to think that in the next ~100 years, humans will be instantly "downloading" concepts like calculus into their brains and communicating with one another telepathically via iPhone 100 cerebral cortex implants. Or something like that.

Until that time arrives and humans are stuck with our mortal shells, however, I agree with the notion that it would do us well as a species to be more accepting in terms of our grammars. The dichotomy of "right" and "wrong" grammar deserves the same overhaul as the oppressively rigid hierarchies that operated behind the scenes of sexuality, race, and gender for centuries (and still do to this day). The “cosmopolitan” communication advocated by Xiaoye You, I think, offers a great opportunity for beginning this endeavor of deconstruction.

For my purposes going forward after this class, this act of deconstruction logically leads to a “non-blanket” approach to teaching writing/composition/rhetoric. America has a proven track record for being about as flexible as a brick. One-size-fits-all cookie cutters might be all well and good for actual baking purposes, but this approach falls far short of meeting the educational needs of the multitudinous clusters of diverse groups across America (and the world at large).  Student compositions need to feel “real” outside of the classroom, and this, I think, is an area where Rhet./Comp. programs could flourish–by enacting a cosmopolitan, decentralized, bottom-up (student-centered) approach to pedagogy, classrooms need not fall prey to the well intentioned (maybe?) but misguided top-down government attempts at cookie-cutter standards.

All of this reminds me a lot of the Linguistics class I’m taking this semester, and the concept of I-Language (until Apple monopolizes it as “iLanguage”) wherein each speaker/writer/reader/listener of a language has a distinct, unique version of that language which is enough to communicate with others, but that can never be 100% identical to anyone else’s. I’m also reminded of a grammar course I took here at CSUN where the professor commented that grammar only exists so that we can understand one another. Lots of quirky/strange linguistic-y things congeal within this concept, but, as always, our brains come to the rescue by smoothing over the endless differences in language (including accents and dialects) in order to grant us a greater capacity for comprehension across I-Languages.  In this way, English has always been, is, and will always be cosmopolitan—regardless of whether or not we acknowledge it.