Business and Commerce and Fear and Loathing and Literacy and Education and Tree Stump Stupidity and Pig-Ignorance and the Whole Damned Thing

I'm going to attempt a new form of essay writing here -- an essay as a perpetual work in progress. The internet and blogging make it possible; this medium's possibilities never cease to amaze me. They've given me my very own, editor-free workshop magazine, and my very own open-ended printer service guide. What might George Orwell or Henry Ford have done with this medium? The mind boggles.

This thing is likely to ramble and meander. stop and start, pause and accelerate and occasionally puke down the front of its shirt and its pants and be thoroughly ashamed of itself -- I don't care. I've had a snoot-full of orthodox bullshit in sixty years, and I mean to cut loose.

What shall I start with? How about the technicalities of English grammar?

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The Technicalities of English Grammar

Here are a few words that mean next-to-nothing to me:

- Conjunction

- Pluperfect (I love that one.)

- Preposition

- Subjunctive (WTF!?)

None of those four words means much of anything to me, yet I can speak and write the language reasonably well. Here we have a mystery.

I'm on record as being a great believer in the necessity of precise use of language in order to be able to convey the intricacies of, say, replacing the battery in a pickup truck, yet I'm not conversant with the technicalities of the language that conveys those intricacies. My connection with the language is pretty much entirely intuitive. And English is not my first language. My first language was Croatian. I learned English at about the age of five when I began school with all the other Canadian kids; I learned it in what seems to me now like an eyeblink. No 'teacher' taught me it. Could it be that our modern notions of 'education' are a falsity? That there is really no such thing as 'education'; there is only learning, and learning operates from the inside out, not from the outside in.

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