A Fiveteen Word Sentence

The other day while strolling through my friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart [sorry consumer activists], I was incredibly alarmed. No, it wasn't the big bargain rollbacks, the human/banshee crossbreed children running freely through the aisles, nor the new Dora the Statutory Explorer dolls. It was the butchering of the English language. Now, I am not some stuck up Niles Crane-esque figure who cringes when the phrase "me and my buddies" is spoken. And I am certainly not picking on people who are learning the language, or people who are speaking their culture's dialect. None of that would be fair, and I would be the world's largest hypocrite for getting upset over that. But this... This was something entirely different. A woman saying "Him didn't pick up the phone", a man saying something is "fiveteen two seven" for $15.27. This is how adults are speaking in public now? What is probably even more frightening is that they were with their children. Those kids are screwed.

I was pretty upset by all of this and it was on my mind all night. I couldn't sleep after Letterman, and since Jimmy Fallon is in Conan's spot, I started to flip around the channels. After much clicking, I come across an old mind numbing love-to-hate favorite: MTV's Next. If you are not familiar with this show, five contestants follow a guy/girl they want to go on a blind date with on a big bus, they come out one at a time, and when the dater he gets bored [or, in a classic episode, when a girl pees her pants] they yell "Next!" and send them back to the bus. Then this girl recites a mocking poem summarizing what just happened four seconds ago while they walk back. While the date is going on, the four waiting/nexted contestants sit in the bus and read conversations off of cue cards. During this episode, one of the girls on the bus says "Do you want to hear a story? Once I found a photo on my boyfriend's phone of a hoohoo that wasn't mine" and it cut back to the date. Wait... Wait... That is what you call a story? There is no beginning, middle, and end. That was a statement. That was a fiveteen word sentence. That is not a story, my "hoohoo" finding friend.

Maybe this is what is happening to us, though. This horrible experiment where we start off with The Bachelor where some nonfamous rich guy has to weed out these girls and propose on the season finale. Then we replace the nonfamous rich guy and now a bisexual internet porn star is the object of affection/infection. This is such a success, they start putting in washed up rapper and rock stars. Then we put them on a bus. Then, after the success of Mork And Mindy, they start making spinoffs. Except instead of Robin Williams in rainbow suspenders, we get illiterate carriers of diseases I watched film strips about in fifth grade. What small shred of dignity reality may have once had is long gone, if it was ever there at all. Where we once had talented actors delivering lines written by college graduates, we now have girls throwing up on Bret Michaels' shoes. On the bright side, we can always count on quality material for The Soup.