Jesus and the Twelve Apostrophes

Recently I had occasion to visit a facility offering something called healthcare (sic). Such an event used to be called going to the doctor, and health care, as two words, was part of the phraseology of insurance forms.
In times long past, one said hello to the receptionist (probably a high school classmate), and sat in a waiting room to read a ten-year-old copy of National Geographic. After a bit a registered nurse in a crisp (forgive the cliché’, but it is apt) white uniform complete with nursing cap and school pin opened a door to say, "The doctor will see you now."

Now one says hello to the receptionist (still probably an old pal from school), who gives the bearer of a fevered brow a greasy ball-point pen and a portfolio of almost illegible forms, photocopies of photocopies of photocopies, over which to labor while the receptionist photocopies the patient’s insurance card, pharmacy card, Sam’s Club card, and driving license. After a wait in a room full of the sick staring slack-jawed at CNN on a widescreen telly, a person of indeterminate rank and skills, wearing pajamas of indeterminate color and hygiene, admits the suffering for healthcare.

I suppose the coming phrase is "The healthcare provider will healthcare you now."

Combining words and employing nouns as verbs are fashions now ("cutting edge," I believe it’s called, "educating for the 21st century"), along with the elimination of punctuation.

In school a drill team is now called a colorguard, and they aren’t guarding the colors or even carrying them; the FFA does that. The denotation of color guard is the assemblage of soldiers carrying the national and unit colors, flanked by two riflemen, and don’t even think of messin’ with those colors unless you want to die. Now color guard, jammed into colorguard, is a team of dancers who wave bright cloths on the ends of sticks. These routines are certainly entertaining, and I yield to no one in my admiration of dance from ballet to Gene Kelly to boot-scootin’ something-or-other. But a dance troupe is not a color guard; one might with equal accuracy call it small-unit action against a gun emplacement.

One also reads of the modern tendency to exile commas and apostrophes to the same outlands as the semi-colon; one who has suffered through sixth-grade grammar drills is initially tempted to stand and applaud. But before we push the poor old apostrophe into a boxcar of the Siberian Express (return ticket not an issue), let us rememberer the real purpose (not Ol’ Miz Grundy’s sadistic got’cha game) of punctuation. Consider the following line:

PATERNOSTERQVIINCOELISESTSANCTIFICETVRNOMENTVVMADVENIATREGNVMTVVMFIATVOLVNTVSTVAINTERRAETINCOELVM…

Makes no sense, right? Now let’s separate the words, allow for little letters, and add some punctuation:

Pater Noster, Qui in Coelis est, sanctificetur Nomen Tuum, adveniat regnum Tuum, fiat voluntus tua in Terra et in Coelum…

Now we’re getting somewhere. As with geometry, accept as a given that Pater Noster means Father Ours, and the rest can easily be worked out. However, even in English we would have problems with no word separation, no small letters, and no punctuation:

OURFATHERWHOARTINHEAVENHALLOWEDBETHYNAMETHYKINGDOMCOMETHYWILLBEDONEINEARTHASITISINHEAVEN…

Oh, easy enough to sort out a line or two, but can one imagine reading The Bible (and which one, anyway?), work orders, nursing notes, bills of lading, or a Louis L’Amour shoot-‘em-up printed like that?

Language changes, but that change should flow naturally with the passage of time and with the need to express new technologies. We should not scurry like mice in obedience to the chief mouse to discard the carefully worked out usages of time and reality. Punctuation and word usage are about clarity and aesthetics, not ideology.

So for now, at the end of the day, the bottom line is, when push comes to shove, in today’s society, in a heartbeat, at this point in time, when the skinny lady sings, the cutting edge of education for the 21st century means thinking outside the box 24/7 in order to define a generation along a long and winding dusty country road for the just plain common people changed our lives forever as a person met his or her fate when a hurricane was brewing and then slammed ashore in an expression of freedom of choice for women’s healthcare because the wrath of Mother Nature…(fade to a Blue Bell commercial).