By Martin H. Levinson

From the Boston Tea Party to the 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, Americans have always been partisan and overblown in their emotions. Some have explained this by saying that it is in our genes and our cultural DNA to not get along with each other. Today, some say it is due to cable news programs that go out of their to way to jack up outrage in their viewers, and the negative effects of television and social media on people’s ability to reason. But I believe the explanation for why Americans are so acrimonious and one-sided is simpler than that. It’s English, with its officious and overdramatic parts of speech, that leads us to be rancorous and divisive.  Case in point, proper nouns.

Proper nouns, because they are spelled with initial capital letters, believe they are better than all the other nouns, who they label as common. The “common” nouns understandably hate that tag and try to strike back at the proper nouns whenever and wherever they can. When proper nouns are used in a sentence the common ones will often mock them as being condescending, snobbish, stick-in-the-muds. Sometimes they will put a banana peel in the middle of a sentence just to see if they can get a proper noun to slip on it and cause the sentence to fragment.

Possessive nouns are nouns that are egoistical and selfish about other words in their life; clinging to them tightly and saying “Mine!” They get super jealous when other nouns are used instead of them and they get really upset when nouns make friends with words they don’t know. Being insecure and controlling, possessive nouns will often wreak havoc on other parts of speech that just want to keep the conversation going and everything semantically correct.

Reflexive pronouns (himself, herself, myself, itself) are not pro nouns. Rather, they reflexively like to put nouns down and try to make them look like crap, which is a word no one wants to be associated with. Reflexive pronouns believe they are the most important grammatical features on the lexical landscape. Instead of quietly and thoughtfully functioning by themselves as noun phrases, these jokers often get their jollies by letting every word within linguistic hailing distance know it’s all about them. At parties, they typically only talk about themselves or any of the other selves.

Let’s look at action verbs. When an action verb is transitive it is followed by a direct object, for example, “let’s eat pie.” When an action verb is intransitive, it does not have a direct object, to wit, “let’s eat.” Each of these verb classes thinks their way of looking at actions is the only way to look at them. Because of that belief, when transitive verbs and intransitive verbs get thrown together in the same paragraph there is often hell to pay and interjections such as “Yipes!” or “What!” often get bandied about.

Speaking of interjections, these utterances invariably piss off all the other syntactical categories when they are employed, as they are viewed by other words as being superfluous to the meaning of a sentence and the exclamation points that frequently follow them are seen as arrogant. That the rules of English allow interjections to be used by themselves in standalone sentences is another strike against these lexemic drama queens.

Adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions are despised by nouns and verbs that resent being modified, conjunctions are disliked for making sentences longer than they should be, and articles are constantly pooh-poohed for being small in number and having to sidle up to nouns to make their presence felt. Long story short, the components of English are crazy and that the language has not been institutionalized can only be ascribed to luck or the fact that if you locked up all its grammatical parts we would have nothing to say because we would not have the means to say it.

So the next time you are in a situation where someone is spouting political talking points in a venomous and hysterical manner don’t get bent out of shape by it. It’s not that they are biased, low-information individuals who have rocks in their heads and don’t know diddlysquat about politics. It’s English that is making them talk and act like dipsticks.