I recently watched a television program in which a black character had her pronunciation of a word corrected by a white character. The word was “ask”, mispronounced as “ax”. The setting was the 1950s, and the characters were an upper middle-class housewife and her household help. As the employer explained, her concern was for her newborn. The young actress portraying the servant conveyed a barely discernible displeasure and quiet humiliation. My sympathy lay with the mom.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about teaching English as a second language, but I remember it was long before I ever heard the term “Ebonics”. It was like a light turning on. Why, I wondered, had a similar approach not been taken for some black students? That “light”, I’m ashamed to say, never grew brighter than a recurring thought, brought to mind this time by the convergence of that television show and a news story about some young black men blowing job interviews because of poor grammar.

If I seem to have overcome the dilemma that is the English language, I assure you I have not. It is a constant struggle. I have a bit of an easier time writing than I have speaking, but neither one is without effort and my efforts are not always successful. Four hundred years after African slaves were brought here from their native-speaking lands, too many of their descendants still have trouble mastering standard English. Yes, there’s a story behind that. Learning was prohibited during slavery, and for a hundred years after slavery those descendants were given much more to worry about in their lives than things like syntax. There was little evidence any benefits would accrue to precise elocution. At times, in fact, the opposite was true. Being “articulate” could be dangerous in the presence of whites who could neither define nor spell that word. Still, some blacks became English teachers while others remained Ebonics speakers. Fortunately, deficiencies in diction and grammar are not necessarily an impediment to effective communication – as many a rapper will attest.

It’s questionable how much any of this matters. Languages change over time. The English of Beowulf is not the English of The Canterbury Tales, both of which seem to have been written in foreign languages when compared to the English of Othello. William Shakespeare’s English doesn’t read the same as Mark Twain’s, and Twain’s wonderful writing has begun to seem archaic to some modern minds. Change in a language is not something that only happens over long periods of time, but from moment to moment as well.

At present, we seem to have unknowingly yet collectively decided a few picayune points – none of which have anything to do with slang. I don’t know when or why it began, but for some time now I’ve been plagued by noticing things I’d prefer not to notice. Increasingly, I hear fictional characters and real newscasters, talk-show hosts, pundits and others say things they ought to know better than to say. I put some of the blame on their writers. If, for example, your job is to put words in the mouth of Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey, it shouldn’t be grammar no English aristocrat would be caught dead using. At least, that should be the case, but even Julian Fellowes, the creator/writer of Downton (and, himself, a Baron and member of the House of Lords) occasionally forgets. It is either that, or he enjoys the idea of having an old man yell at the television.

So, for the sake of sanity, I’m asking everyone to rethink just a few, small things. First, I want people to lie down again. No one lies anymore. Everyone lays all the time. People are more than welcome to continue to lay anything they want, but I want them to lie when appropriate. Also, I want this request to remain between you and me, not between you and I (no matter what you and I may think). Finally, keep this in mind: others may complain about the state of the language less often than I, but that does not mean they have “less” complaints; it suggests they have fewer.

See? It’s just a short list, perhaps a pointless one if we already have reached the tipping point. If that’s the case, we’re well on our way to a new English. I have no idea what it will be like, so don’t ax.