Our daily speech should reflect Princeton's quality

Everyone who knows me has heard the recitation of my computer woes. They began shortly after I started at Princeton — my computer just stopped working. It would shut down for no reason, and no one could fix it or even guess what was wrong. In the eighteen months I owned it, I sent it back for repair three times. Every time it came back from repairs, it had the same problems in less than a month. It took me a month to convince Hewlett Packard to give me a new computer, including several very nasty phone calls.

In fact, most of the nasty phone calls centered around why HP couldn't return my calls. They didn't seem to understand me when I told them I literally wasn't in my room from 8 in the morning to 11 in the evening. This is not to brag — I know everyone has awful schedules, but I don't think HP understood. When it got to the point that I had to miss a class to make another nasty phone call, it proved too much. I let loose a string of four letter words that I think was probably the worst the customer service representative had heard at least for the day. I don't have a very high tolerance level. It did something though. He offered to take my email address as well as phone number, but this was when I cringed. It was one of the most awful moments in terms of social mortification to have to give my, "@Princeton.edu" e-mail address after fitting so well into the "she must go to Princeton" stereotype in the most negative sense possible.

True, mine was a failing of good manners, but there was certainly additional shame. I'd just fallen into the trap of being the Ivy League brat who acted like she thought herself above common courtesy. It made me think more seriously about what it really means to go to Princeton, not just in terms of what opportunities it affords me or what bubble it provides, but also about how I should comport myself.

I also started thinking more about what it means to say you know someone goes to Princeton. The idea more often has a negative connotation, but it doesn't have to the way it probably would for the man I had spoken to following our conversation. Sometimes I wonder if the bad language (both foul and ungrammatical) on campus is a reflection of students' desire for people to think that they don't seem like the sort who would go to Princeton. We, like much of American culture, are guilty of glorifying the mediocre and accepting less than our best. Given the very mission of Princeton, this hardly makes sense.

Hence, I'd like to suggest that we all (and I include myself in this more than anyone I can think of) start making more of an effort to fix our language. We are all willing to expend effort on classes, sports teams, socializing and singing — to name a few common activities. The way we present ourselves in all these situations is a function of the language we use to a certain extent, particularly in a classroom situation. Yet we are all wont to begin comments in class with, "Ummmm," and populate sentences that should consist of eight or ten words with five appositive "likes." If nothing else, shouldn't we be ashamed to put on such performances in front of our professors?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has sat through a painful classroom discussion — not painfully boring or stilted, but painfully worded. Yes, many discussion situations, even in class, are fairly casual, but this isn't an excuse to be lax about grammar, particularly when it comes to misusing words. By the time we get here, almost all of us have had twelve years of education, most of those years with some form of instruction about how to communicate properly, starting with learning to write and usually including an analysis of the usual classic books. You shouldn't be at Princeton if you don't know the basic mechanics of proper English (though please don't judge this editorial!)

Let me plead with the Princeton community. Let's start talking like we're paying $40,000 a year to educate ourselves — that's not even a hypothetical situation, because we are. Let's act like we want to be viewed as scholars, rather than someone you wouldn't even know went to Princeton.

Aileen Nielsen is a sophomore from Brooklyn, N.Y.