Our modern written language suffers...

from the sterility imposed by the Electronic Grammar Police. The word processor Spell Check Nazis try to impose the death of uniformity on the petals of my paragraphs the instant I create them. This is the great sin of modern technology: the enormous crushing pressure of expression into the mode.

The value of any word is, at best, the median of our inter-subjective agreement. The meaning of a phrase, of a sentence, or any longer construction, always contains an interpretative component.

Literary constructions are often more historically enduring when a bit more interpretation is required.

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch" is a grammatical nightmare, according to the algorithms available to my computer, but it is one of world's great books. Garcia-Marquez writes in his biography, "Living to Tell the Tale," of how he never learned to spell -- ever. (A difficulty with spelling is typical of a Montessori education in a non-phonetic language.)

I do not condone ignorance by those with a choice. There are many who just never learned to write. But the Blues are not subject to spell check. Nor are poetry, prose, and Bob Dylan lyrics.

The Microsoft Sentence Stasi should be recognized for it's heinous flattening of the robust consciousness of language; for it's violence against the potential variable character of every written construction. Word Perfect - and the name itself should send one groping for an air sickness bag - should be banished for suggesting and pushing sentences onto paper as polished and sterile as something spoken on a medical TV show written and taped in university theater in Ohio. Is this device now become John Fay's Monster?

Business doth not thereby prosper. Children do not expand intellectually. My mind becomes a leaden weight that watches for discolored text and I know not. I think even less.

Help me write badly, thus defined.

I don't
           know
         how
       to
     ignore it
here.