Doing Grammar Good

At my place of work, some anticipatory banners have been rigged from the ceiling rafters for advertising purposes. These banners read, verbatim: "R U Ready 4 School?" The irony, I think, is at least double-edged. First of all, the subliminal implication of this advertisement seems to be that education is "hip" in precisely the same way as rap/pop music, which both utilise these abbreviations regularly. Perhaps lingering around the edges of the subliminal message is also the idea that education is "hip" in the same way as Instant Messenger conversations with friends, which also prominently feature such dictional shortcuts.

That is all somewhat ironic, since "hip" as education might be, it certainly has not the "hipness" of Britney Spears, ghetto culture, or late-night digital palaver about "that-hot-guy-who-works-at-Dairy-Queen-who-might-B-the-one-4-U." However, the irony digs deeper; the school, after all, is a place where we learn to communicate like rational, sentient beings. Phonetic-hyper-abbreviation, or whatever you want to call this (hopefully transient) fad, is certainly not a phenomenon that leads to rational discourse, and even D. Grammarian (the world's most hardened descriptive grammar theorist) finds this trend "worthy of being arrested as it does not significantly benefit the structure of the language or bear historical precedent." P. Grammarian (the ultimate in the prescriptive school) is, of course, rocking back and forth on his floor hugging an unsplit infinitive to his chest, calling for mother. To be considerably more blunt: who came up with the idea of advertising educational material with moronic teeny-bopper banners? Don't parents buy the stuff themselves anyway? Or wait ... maybe the mothers like Britney too.