A Canadian's Poems

Excerpt. (c) Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From the Preface to the poems] Man has used his vocal chords to communicate with for many hundreds of thousands of years.Most likely, speech is an innate gift.Writing is not.Whereas speech has come naturally to us for hundreds of thousands of years, writing is a much more recent invention.The current, earliest known forms of human writing are probably the cave drawings, found all over the world.But they are only a few tens of thousands of years old.Our English language is a ten seconds to midnight latecomer on the planetary linguistic stage.Originating in a small area in present-day Germany less than sixteen centuries ago, oral English has evolved and spread everywhere, precociously.Written English did not receive its current form of codified grammar until the mid nineteenth century.English grammar in its current form did not exist before then.Our greatest writers in English, people like Shakespeare and Milton, never studied grammar because the rules of English grammar did not exist in any form until at least a century after them.Neither are there any grammar books on oral English usage. More than 1,000 million people on this planet currently use English, in one form or another.There are no more than 300 million users of English in the US, and 60 million in the UK.So, International English, used by more than 600 million people, is the new norm.It is the new common standard of English expression on this planet.International English is a complex of hybrids created by a majority of users whose mother tongues are not English.More, their mother tongues are often very different from English.The effects upon traditional English ie. US & UK] of these hybrids is profound.For example, when a tonal language like Putonghua, spoken in China, and the most popular language on the globe, collides with the English language, the effects upon the English language are structural in nature.And Putonghua is more in sync with our new authority on global English usage -the instant-everywhere-forever world of "www.,"the web.In this new authority, Google, not The Queen, is king: algorithms, not phonetics, rule English usage.In this new chatterverse of "www." there is no past or future, no localized position or place.Everything is here, now, forever.Our overly complex, fragmented verb formations and tenses implode into a singular present simple reality.The A or B positional logic of our prepositions becomes illogical and unnecessary.In everywhere there is no longer any pre-position anywhere.Two major categories of English grammar, verbs and prepositions, in their forms as nineteenth century grammatical constructs, collide with, fracture and disintegrate under the existential conditions of the all-at-once, everywhere-forever properties of the internet.They also obstruct and impede understanding of realities which exist within this global chatterverse.