Andy, I feel you, bruh (a phrase I wouldn’t have thought to use twenty years ago) and I even gave you a vote, in a fit of commiseration, but Candace is on the money. Language changes and slang becomes acceptable usage as soon as someone in the public eye is heard (or misheard not) using it.

Sadly, printed books are not the authority they once were, despite how some of us clutch them like pearls in our shock and astonishment at the way our mother tongue is being so wantonly twisted.

I have cringed at “all of the sudden” and “all the sudden” (a congressperson’s use of it brings me here tonight) since I started hearing it five years ago. But I expect by then it had been happening for a minute, since I’ve just been too damned old to run with the pack for nearly a score of earthly orbits.

The same feeling came over me in the aughts when I noticed that the letter “t” and even “th” were getting shorter shrift than they had for the first forty years of my life. “Nothing,” “nutting” and even “nuthin’” had all been left cold for “nu’in.”

I have a friend I’ve known since 1985 who still says “supposably.” We all gave him trouble about it but he just never got over what we all chalked up to a bad habit that his parents neglected to nip in the bud. He has a teenager now and I often wonder how that situation has sorted itself.

Not long after landing in Indiana, after most of a life out West, I got a job at the local library where i was offended by the lack of the words “to be” where I knew they absolutely should have (please don’t say “should of” near me) been. Suddenly the people whom the entire community considered arbiters of acceptable elocution were telling me “that binding needs fixed” and I wanted to die.

I know a Scottish lass who cannot understand how the rest of us get “hoo” from “who,” and I have no good answer for her.

It’s unbearable hell, but the wet sand is escaping from under our toes every time the waves roll out. The only consolation is the same is certain to keep happening and none will be spared the indignity.