Dan Mooney

What with the Mets’ season over already and my own Old Timers’ league winding down for the summer, I’ve reclaimed my nights and weekends, which only means I’ve been watching much more TV than usual. I first realized this when I decided to devote these next few hundred words to a commercial. Yes, advertising is everywhere, even here.

The ad on today’s agenda – and it’s an ad, despite the fuzzy PSA undertones – is for an HPV/cervical cancer vaccine called Gardasil. You might have seen it around, but let’s take another look:

Did you find that tough to get through? My stomach turns every time I see it. With almost each passing sentence in the spot, I shed another tear for the shame we continue to bring on our race. My rage is equaled only by my sadness when I consider what we’re doing, and truly what we’ve already done, to the younger female demographic that might be among the only innocents left on our planet. How dare we?

One less woman? How about one fewer woman?

Each of these independent minded young women is mature and responsible enough not to want to contract HPV in the effort to stem cervical cancer – and yet not one is willing to stand up with a handwritten sign correcting the pinheads who hatched this marketing scheme: One fewer, not one less. Our future!

One less –- two syllables, strong sounding, fits squarely into the double-dutch rhyme at the end of the clip there. I get it. But I don’t excuse it for being horribly, wildly inaccurate.
Not because I’m picky when it comes to this, or that there aren’t other grammar rules that I and everyone else have let slide (I try not to split infinitives, ever, but then I don’t always eat my vegetables, either).

What bothers about this particular ad – well, what bugs me the most is the semi-automatic repetition of the earsore: one less, one less, one less – but what bothers me slightly less than that is the message embedded in this error: We are enlightened individuals, destroyers of ignorance who care enough about ourselves to take certain precautions, and who love ourselves enough to want to tell everyone else how enlightened we are. In the dumbest sounding way possible.

I applaud these medical advances. I certainly hope they work, and I do think more good than harm will come of them. But I also disagree with the idea that our collective energy should be focused solely on curtailing the spread of STDs while poor grammar usage goes viral, infecting more and more people, of all ages and genders, especially children, on an even more fundamental level.

Be strong. Be a beacon. Stop the ignorance. Call attention to one petty inaccuracy at a time.

Few grammar rules fit into the category that encompasses both “ones I know and use” and “ones I notice others not using.”

‘Ere I start, let me ask: Why don’t I spread this out and not fit it all into one post? Nice. I was thinking of serializing the material on this blog, but that was met with reluctance on my part (I didn’t feel like it) because I know there’s something to the construction/combination/synthesizing of two discrete pieces of information into a new, third idea. Like poems in a chapbook, I like how each poem can be independent of all others, yet fit within a larger mosaic to play its part on another scale entirely. How a note can resound a certain tone, and also be a part of a chord. And for that matter, a variety of chords, major and minor in key.

One grammar rule that burned more deeply into my brain was the one about splitting infinitives. “To drive” is an infinitive. “To not drive” is worse than a rake on a chalkboard to my ears. Notice the root for “infinity” in that word “infinitive.” There’s an entirety between that “to” and that “drive.” And no one’ll put that asunder.

Except everyone. Even me, and that’s the shameful part. I do my best to avoid splitting that infinitive, but occasionally, for the sake of laziness or just not to sound like a tightly wound perfectionist (if it walks like a duck) I’ll embed that not, perhaps even to thumb my nose at intellectualism just like the lion’s share of the American populace.

Gotta pick my battles. Listen up: “To boldly go…” Star Trek. I guess in the distant future, after meeting up with those extra-terrestrials, the rule will have been permanently abandoned. And why not? When you’ve got a whole universe to explore, all these new experiences to process, the rigors of language seem not so exciting, or significant, maybe rightfully so.

In our time, besides being petty, maybe that rule is archaic to the point of impracticality, like so much else from the past. That’s the delicacy of languages, of meaning, truly of epistemology itself — they shift, they live, they breathe. But I’m going to stick to my guns on this one, lingual evolution be damned – we may unshackle our hearts and maybe our minds, but this rule and dozens like it are what brought us here to this level of understanding. If everything is relative, meaning is differential, this = not that, and nothing exists except in our minds, I say we’d better keep them sharp. We’ve got to understand each other.

Clear as mud. Is that all Greek to you or what?