The Importance of Language

It is very important to display respect for proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. If you ignore, da rulez then Eberibody would think ur ineducated. Poor; black or hispanick!

In fact, the Huguenots in 17th century France used to execute Catholics for joining independent clauses with commas. The epitaphs of the victims would read, “If two or more clauses, grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon. Vive la liberté.”

The epitaphs themselves would not literally “read.” That’s a figure of speech. Other figures of speech include, “You rock my socks off,” “The proof is in the pudding,” “The Houston Astros are a major league baseball team,” and “Equal pay for equal work.”

But where did language come from, you might be wondering. Who invented it? Why can’t we stop talking? How did people text each other before cell phones? These questions are all answered in the tale of the turtle and the massage therapist: Way back, before the time of spoken word albums, a turtle visited a massage therapist. The turtle was very sore. The massage therapist wanted to help. He rubbed the turtle’s legs. The turtle groaned. He rubbed her tail and neck. Still in pain. He massaged her belly. That only tickled, in a bad way. The turtle struggled to communicate, attempting to turn her guttural sounds into something the massage therapist could understand. She tried a higher pitch. Louder. Higher. Louder. The massage therapist mimicked the noises and pushed harder. The turtle’s voice wobbled like a banshee’s. The massage therapist moved his fingers towards her—“No, under the shell, goddamnit,” the turtle shouted. Those words contained all the elements necessary to create all the world’s languages.

At one point, though, language completely disappeared. It was on August 21st, 1953. At 1:24 pm GMT, everybody in the world forgot how to speak. It was beautiful. Everybody listened to each other, but there was nothing to be heard. Thirteen million people fell in love at that moment. Twelve people decided not to spay or neuter their pets. But the silence was broken when a car alarm told someone to “Step away from the vehicle. Step away from the vehicle. Step. Step. Step away. Step away now.” The criminal danced. That criminal was me

In fact, Neanderthals could speak. It’s true. Not hoots and hollers but idioms and expletives. They were dirty sons of bitches. They exchanged information about wooly mammoth droppings and sabertooth genitalia. A Neanderthal carcass was recently found atop a Swiss mountain called the Samsung Galaxy S-Mountain. Flesh intact. Cause of death: yo mama jokes.

Would you believe me if I told you that words are meaningless unless they have to do with Jesus? Talk about his robe, his beard, his pearly black skin. Mel Gibson is God.

Similarly, a teacher once told me that words are useless unless you soak them in enough preservatives to last for weeks instead of days. The preservatives, you might argue, are unhealthy to consume, but they’re better than starving to death. Not everybody can afford organic verbs. Poems rot. Narrative non-fiction corrodes. The icebox changed the world.

The last thing I want to mention and really my main point is that you shouldn’t take Angela Merkel for granted. She’s very important not only to Germany but to the EU as a whole. She’s not going to be around forever. Be sweet to her. Send her a Candygram.



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