Speaking English Good

The other day I went to the store to pick up a few things. Walking through the aisles, I spotted a girl whom I recognized from high school. We weren't friends back in high school, but I had had a number of classes with her. She also just happens to be the star of one of the most memorable moments of my high school career. Memorable because it was so sad.

Now, I'm not a stickler, and I'm far from perfect, but I've taken pride in being able to speak and write my native language well. Grammar, spelling, syntax; these are things which we should all have a basic familiarity with. If only that were the case.

When I was in tenth grade, I took French, which I enjoyed very much. One day, in the foreign language department at Tremper High School, exchange students from a variety of different countries, who were attending our school at the time, made rounds from class to class, telling us about their experiences in the U.S. and how it differed from their native country.

My classroom hosted a girl from Germany. Her English was nearly impeccable. Very impressive, to say the least. We asked her all sorts of questions, and a good time was had by all. After about a half hour, one of my classmates — the aforementioned girl — raised her hand and said to the German exchange student, "You speak English good."

Did you feel that? That little shiver? That was your soul trying to escape your body. That was your soul trying to escape this plane of existence, perhaps for a more gooder one.*

What was more frightening, perhaps, was that I was one of the only students in the class to understand the tragic irony in my classmate's comment. I thought surely someone would call her on it, but no one did. And the shadow that crept over the classroom that day remained there for the rest of the semester, slowly eating away at our humanity.

Feel that? That's your soul trying to get back in. Don't let it. For its own good, friend. Don't you let it.

DISCLAIMER
When doing a post about correct spelling or grammar, there's always the danger of misspelling a word or using a word incorrectly within the very article that you're writing. If you should find such an error within this post, write it down on a piece of paper, put that piece of paper in an envelope, then go the post office and throw it into one of their trash cans.

* I'm well aware that this sentence contains a grammatical error. That's the joke. I'm very funny.