Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

I’m pretty liberal about most things, but I take a conservative view of what’s happening to the English language as it is spoken and written in the United States today. Frankly I am surprised at how many people do not speak correctly, and it isn’t necessarily those who come from other countries or who have little schooling.

Business people, educators, and other professionals all hack away at our language. They say: He don’t. We wasn’t. Him and me went to the movies. Where was you?

Some may cite the proliferation of bad grammar in advertising slogans, rock lyrics, and supposedly clever plays on words as the cause of this decline in good grammar. But I think these language arenas are mirroring society at large, rather than the other way around.

In this season of battleground states and the war of words, neither candidate has focused on grammar as a burning national issue. So I offer a simple solution to combat the problem. It’s too late to get my proposal of a Pledge of Allegiance on any ballot, so I offer it here as a write-in candidate of sorts. Raise your right hand, and repeat after me.

“I pledge allegiance to good English and to pronouns and the nouns for which they stand. I accept the diversity of verbs, their tenses, and their modifiers. I believe in the rules for punctuation, spelling, and capitalization and will use them to work toward freedom of expression and clarity for all.”