The Transom: 'All Would of Been Caos'

Among my peers in high school and for a couple of years in college, a small book circulated with some regularity. It was a posthumously published mock-history entitled The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody and written by Will Cuppy (1884-1949), a humorist often given to malapropisms to achieve his ends.¹ He might terminate an error-laden discussion of some king or other by remarking that the poor man had died of a 'cerebral hemorrhoid,' for instance. Well, ha, ha. I never cared much for Cuppy, not because I cared more for history, but because the humour seemed so strained. A little bit of it went a very long way, I thought.

Nowadays, poor Cuppy appears to have been consigned to the dustpile of literature by thousands upon thousands of undergraduates whose writing is much funnier than his; but their humour is, of course, unintentional.

For years, I have maintained a file of undergraduate stupidities (graduate stupidities are maintained in the thesis and dissertation section of the library), consisting of words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that would not have come into my possession if I had retreated early on, as friends suggested, to the relative safety of machine-graded multiple-choice and true/false exams. I thought for a while that I was perhaps alone in maintaining such a file, but then other people began publishing theirs.² So, not wishing to see my collection ignored, and having this venue available to me, I opened my file and pulled together the following paragraph, which will carry the reader through approximately 400 years of American history:

Cortex was a Spainard who exsplored the fronteer witch was Indian Terrotoy a hunnerd years before the Puretons (who wanted to be called Pillgrams) came to America from Britian. The Spainishmen came thru the Carriebeen. Others from Brittain included the Quakkers. All these peaple loved Jessus and thought the indigieos were ultametly obsurb bafoones and had to be conquired, and this brought the stragedy of Manifest Destination that led exsplores across the Missippy and the dessert. The federal congrass was all for it. The Indians were massicured. The Eerie Cannal was one way to go west. Raleroads had to have right-aways for their roots across the country, and they were helping sittle the land and get it survade, along with the calvary and the infrantry and other troups, because without there autherity, all would of been caos. There was alot of dieseace around, amoung witch was chlorea, witch moreless killed alot of nomantic peaple and even some sedimentary ones. After the Cival War ended at Apadomax, Va., and the abolisision of slavory, Lincon got assinated and alot of peaple went west to steak a claim. There were meatings on how to purchass and uptain land. Treadys with Indians were numberous and took there sovernty and made them moreless nul-n-void, and they were barley the vigoras peaple they use to be. The West was exallent for cole minning and for the Moormens to go have paligimy, witch was the same as pologmy.

Nope, the kiddies cannot write. (Well, okay, they can write, but it's wrong.) Blame it on the secondary schools, modern advertising, MTV, phonics, video games, or the fact that nobody has yet figured a way to put a spell-check device in a ballpoint pen; but that is the situation.

I'll tell students they are permitted to bring dictionaries to exams. Some do, but most, I gather, do not even own one. Their argument is that it's impossible to look up a word that you don't know how to spell in the first place. I seem to recall from my own experience that such a gambit led quickly to checkmate by a sentence-parsing, which-hunting, anti-infinitive-splitting old battle-axe, along about the fifth grade. But she and her ilk left no heirs, it would appear.

Upon receiving their graded essays, students will contemplate the red ink and then ask, 'Did you count off for this stuff?' I tell them that doing history is an activity that involves communication...