Dr J Ferguson
University of Nevada, Reno
Spring 2018
27 F 18
When incapable of straight communication in the real world, academicians will invent a language with pseudo-scientific terminology in an effort to rationalize the complex nature of understanding one another. They will search high and low, in Native American cultures, sit in igloos and attempt to decipher what the Eskimos are saying, or perhaps take a trip to Siberia and be entertained by the myriad of tongues and dialects spoken there. One comes away from all of this with one question, what purpose does all of this serve?
As a former literary agent for the Writers Guild of America, West, I read several hundred screenplays, graded them and sent them back to the writers offering either rejection or representation. The rejects were due primarily to, as Strother Martin, playing the role of Captain in Cool Hand Luke (1967), so adroitly put it,
"What we've got here..is, failure to communicate."
Most of that failure came from bad grammar, lazy and sloppy screenwriting, and using cheap pidgin and Spanglish type languages. All of the above are what's being touted as something special in linguistic anthropology. It may be fine for the aerospace and health industries, but is unacceptable in a field where communication IS the art form. To what degree are there an unlimited number of jobs in aerospace that some degree of multilingualism is necessary. On the contrary, succinct and precise understanding in a superior language would be far more desirable than the rabble with PhDs all talking in their native tongues.
(The 250-400 word limit of this submission has been reached).