John North Editor & Publisher

Two hot stories from usually chilly New England recently piqued my interest — both regarding youthful disregard for the art of the English language.

The first one was about a graduation speech by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough, who suggested that young people could do one particularly helpful thing to, like, help their country.

“Please, please do what you can to cure the verbal virus that seems increasingly rampant among your generation,” he urged Boston College’s class of 2008 in mid-May.

The other story alluded to a subject that I addressed in this space several months ago, involving a break-in and vandalism at poet Robert Frost’s former home in Middlebury, Vermont.

Prosecutor John Quinn was successful in his bid to achieve, shall we say, poetic justice. A court has ordered the more than two dozen young people who broke into Frost’s former home for a beer party and trashed the place to study Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and another poem.

Indeed, Frost biographer Jay Parini, who will lead the study sessions, hopes to show the vandals the error of their ways — and the redemptive power of poetry.

“I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property in the future and would also learn something from the experience,” Quinn noted.

The vandalism occurred at the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, where Frost spent more than 20 summers before his death in 1963. On Dec. 28, a 17-year-old former Middlebury College employee decided to hold a party that drew about 50 people and resulted in $10,600 in damages.

For his part, McCullough complained about a more pervasive form of vandalism — the tendency of young people to debase the English language by the “relentless wearisome use of words” such as “like,” “awesome” and “actually.”

McCullough added, “Just imagine if, in his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy had said, ‘Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually.”

Surprisingly (and to their credit), the BC graduates gave McCullough a standing ovation.

Both the McCullough speech about using trendy filler words and the Frost sentencing of young people, who must read and discuss certain of his work, give hope that a greater appreciation of clear language and poetic nuance will prevail as the “like you know” generation grows up.
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John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contact at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .