I read an article on wedgies, and I was halfway into it before I realized it wasn't about shoes. The same thing happened with a news report about banning thongs on beaches. "What could possibly be wrong with thongs (flip-flops) on a beach?" I wondered.

I'm reasonably well-educated (maybe that's the problem), but I feel as though I'm losing my grip on my own language--it's an isolating feeling, let me tell you. Language isn't static. It evolves through our worst speakers. I get that. Between technology and immigration, we add new vocabulary to the vernacular like we salt our popcorn--liberally. It makes our language colorful and rich...and confusing. Add to that the fact that Gen Y and the Gen-Yet-2B-Named speak their own version of English at the speed of light, and sometimes all I catch is the gist. I want to shout, "slow down!"

Believe me, I'm not advocating that we all speak in a register worthy of a British lord. I use colloquial language. My concern is communication. Woe to anyone learning English with our scads of idioms, regional dialects, and irregular constructions. Then there's text-speak, with all those acronyms...and forget relying on spell-check. Since it can't recognize homonyms, it passes errors such as, "their-they're-there."

Remember "I-before-e, except-after-c, and-when-sounded-like-a, as-in-neighbors-and-weigh"? Little rhymes taught us to deal with irregularities. But now? Irregular verbs, for example, are taking a verbal beating. I confess more than once to doing a mental double-take at, "I was drugged" to mean they were "dragged." It takes me a moment to realize they're not talking about illegal substances. It's just another example of communication being thwarted.

I know people who keep lists of errors that drive them crazy. Many confuse "have" with "of" because the way we speak makes both sound the same: "I might of lost my wallet" for "I might have lost..." Recently, instead of "accustomed," I read "I'm not accustom to my new computer yet." The "ed" sound at the end of "accustomed" ran into the "t" of "to." Communication isn't affected, though. You understand what the speaker or writer intended to say.

Still, I guess what I'm trying to communicate is that, with apologies to George Bernard Shaw, America is becoming a country separated by its language.

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