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Also becoming extinct are adverbs, those mysterious things designed to modify verbs. Although an adverb is usually easy to form by adding an -ly to the adjective form of the word, few people have the time to add the two letters. Nor do many people have the time for a full verb in the common greeting, “How ya doin’?” And when it comes to a response, it’s usually “I’m good,” even though the responder is not and never has been a do-gooder and probably never done good in school either.

Signs of this trend dot the nation’s roads and highways. An example is the warning DRIVE SAFE. It’s enough to still cause some educators to take offense. But that might not include Jerry Weast, a former Maryland school superintendent, who was quoted by a reporter as warning students to “drive careful.”

CREATIVE SPELLMANSHIP

One of the strong attractions of Amglish is the absence of spelling rules except the one to write generally the way a word sounds. The only problem with that is the large number of words with the same interior spelling but different sounds. Examples are bough, cough, though, tough, and through. Computer spelling apps can sometimes help, but they are far from perfect as this anonymous ditty attests:

Eye have run this poem threw it

I am shore your pleased two no

Its letter perfect in its weigh

My checker tolled me sew

Another alternative, of course, is to look up a word in a dictionary. But that can be another time waster. If spelling is still a problem for you, you might consider moving to a country like Italy, where there is no such thing as a spelling problem. Each letter is supposed to be pronounced the way it is written. The only complication is the large number of words that sound exactly the same but have different meanings.

If you can’t or won’t move to Italy, you might wing it the way one eighteen-year-old graduating senior did in the following e-mail to her teacher in pure Amglish. By June 2008, she had been admitted to college from a charter school in the District of Columbia. Here are excerpts as written:

i have 2 take summa skol for English and a lil bit of math (i kno but i spoke to [name omitted] about it and i wil let her kno about how my schedule will run. . . . i need 2 meet up wit you cuz i need sum help on finaical part ther gave me . . . maybe saturaday or Sunday.22

At least the message was clear enough, so who can say Amglish doesn’t work?

THE QUAINT ART OF PENMANSHIP

In the National Museum of Language in College Park, Maryland, cursive handwriting has an honored place amid the coffins for adverbs and subjunctives. In the dark ages, it was still commonly taught. But it’s rare now. This antique style was replaced long ago by the “QWERTY” keyboard, first on typewriters, then on computers.

Emerging in its place has been a type of creative manual printing in a style that is original with each person. But who needs even that anymore? It is getting rare for anything to be handwritten except grocery lists and some phone messages. Meanwhile, the average scribble has now been upgraded to “cursive printing.”

Yet some English professors keep trying to fight the odds. One is Tina Blue, who posted a complaint on the Internet saying she was “about ready to throw in the towel” because she could no longer read or understand many of the student papers she received in her work. So she conducted an experiment that forced her students to copy numerous printed articles by hand as rapidly as possible. Behold, their penmanship improved noticeably. So all she needs to do now is take away their phones and laptops and make them write by hand.23

Fat chance.

PANDAS AND PUNCTUATION

Those little squiggly things that used to be important points of pause in good writing are suffering the same fate as adverbs and subjunctives. They are increasingly ignored. They are also becoming impractical for today’s busiest communicators. Try using them in a text or a tweet of 140 letters or less.

You cant.

A major attempt to save these picayunities came in 2003 in the form of a runaway