My husband and I have a long-standing disagreement about language. I’m kind of a grammar, punctuation, and spelling nazi. I believe that respecting these elements of our language brings precision to our discourse and helps us make ourselves understood. Plus, attention to these details suggests to me that a person has made an effort to educate himself. In much the same way that many whippet-thin people judge me for being overweight, I’m prejudiced against those who have refused to master the use of the apostrophe. There is a difference between plural, possessive, and contractions, and it is a difference that should have been mastered in grade school.
My husband, on the other hand – though his command of English is probably better than my own – takes a much more liberal approach to the subject. His opinion is that language is a dynamic, fluid, ever-evolving thing, and that common usage – NOT long-standing rules – dictates what is acceptable.
We all have ideas about how the world should be, and we nearly all draw lines in the sand about what is and is not acceptable. However open-minded, evolved, and permissive we consider ourselves to be, we all have standards against which we evaluate our fellow human beings. Separating the wheat from the chaff is an important part of building a society. In astrology we call this power of discernment “Virgo.” And during the time Saturn, the planet of rules and regulations has been moving through Virgo, there has been a resurgent clamor to enshrine our personal standards in laws that everyone must follow.
Unfortunately for our exacting Virgo standards – but perhaps to the benefit of humanity – Uranus has been moving through Pisces at the same time. Uranus is an iconoclast who delights in breaking rules and leveling traditions. Pisces is the sign of the collective, the zeitgeist, a blurry and impressionistic portrait that nevertheless captures an artful representation of real life. And Uranus in Pisces is the texting adolescent who ignores nearly all my beloved rules of grammar, punctuation, and even capitalization – yet magically, infuriatingly, manages to make herself understood. Which, according to my Uranus-rising husband, is just as it should be.
At this New Moon in Virgo, the Sun is conjunct unyielding Saturn, with both in a near-perfect opposition to Uranus. This New Moon period caps a long, contentious summer in the United States. The news has been filled with ugly, racially-charged battles about health care reform. Those who stand with Saturn in Virgo contend that health care is strictly a matter of personal responsibility, and on the other side stands the Uranus in Pisces souls who empathize with those who have suffered under the current system and are ready to throw out the whole corrupt, inhumane mess and build something new from scratch.
Health care reform is an important, even urgent issue. I wish we’d get it resolved, if only because I’m getting sick of thinking about it and writing about it. But it’s also indicative of a larger fault line running through the country. There are those who believe in collectivism – let’s call them the Uranus in Pisces people – and those who don’t (we’ll call them the Saturn in Virgo crowd). There are those who believe we are all part of a larger whole, and those who want nothing to do with sharing a planet with people who don’t live up to their standards. The fissure has grown over the years until it has become an abyss.
It’s been sobering, in the course of this meditation, to realize that my tyrannical insistence on proper grammar probably places me in the same camp as those holding up ugly, poorly spelled and racist signs at rallies. It may seem hyperbolic to claim we are one in the same; but the Virgo urge for discrimination that leads me to insist that others follow the rules of grammar is just a hair’s breadth from a different kind of discrimination. Both are ways of dividing the human race into discrete factions – us and them. And that way of thinking makes it increasingly difficult to see ourselves as part of one society, and to work together to solve societal problems.
So, let’s all come together. Let’s introduce universal health care at a reasonable cost to all Americans, and I will offer this pact: Anyone who is able to correctly use and punctuate all forms of the word “there/their/they’re” will be welcome to lecture me about what I eat and how much exercise I’m getting. You see, I’ve paid taxes since 1981 to give everyone the opportunity to learn basic literacy skills in a public school. I’ve done this despite the fact that I have no children, never planned to have any children. In other words, I have happily paid into a system that does not benefit me personally, not just because I’m obligated to do so – but because I dream of someday living in a country in which every store sign is punctuated correctly.
© 2009 April Elliott Kent
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