In half a decade, I have watched the English language dwindle to an all time low. It is, as Vizzini would say, inconceivable. What’s also inconceivable is that, should any of these people who have contributed to putting the English language on its death nettles, will understand that reference, which is as criminal as the damage they’ve done to modern linguistics.

Over winter break, the family and I spent a ton of time watching movies on Netflix, which I rarely get to do anymore since I never have enough time to commit to sitting on my ass for more than an hour at a time outside of a lab or a classroom. Of the movies we watched, which were tons of flicks from the 80s that were generally enjoyable but still terrible through a critical lens, was Adam Sandler’s 2015 Western parody ‘The Ridiculous 6’. Compared to Sandler’s more recent movies, like Funny People, Pixels and Blended, it was enjoyable the whole way through; the dialogue was slightly wittier than normal and it was a quintessential Sandler movie: quick, offensive and light-hearted. It also helped that, like most of my family, I enjoy that brand of humor and don’t generally have a stick up my ass about everything, plus when I know it’s going to be a ‘Happy Madison’ production, I know that nothing I’m going to see is going to change the way I think or my life, so there’s no need to critically analyze or even think about what I’m watching outside of ‘that’s a good carpet-muncher joke’.

I’ve seen most of Adam Sandler’s movie library and I am unashamed to admit that I like a lot of his movies. Part of it is because I like to be a contrarian asshole and go against the grain with almost anything, but most of it is because of what I’ve stated above. It’s mind-boggling to see the hatred for him and his work when all he’s ever done since become an actor is an extension of his stand-up. I used to partially understand why people didn’t like his movies, since about the same time he become a popular actor the movie industry pushed out a slew of great, thought-provoking and engaging films, and for a good portion of the middle of his acting career, he was definitely phoning it in. However, having the benefit of being older and having lost that teenage douchiness in place of criticisms that are actually thought out and not rooted in ‘well, because duh’ has left me questioning why people are so down on the dude.

This thought had nagged at me since seeing Funny People, which I thought was fine, but my friends thought was utter garbage. At the same time, these same friends were gushing over Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation and that G.I. Joe movie that’s only redeeming quality was Rachel Nichols, so take their opinion with a grain of salt, as did I. I never put any deeper thought into the matter since trying to stay afloat as an undergrad was definitively more important than wondering why people hate the guy who was in 50 First Dates, and, again, he was in 50 First Dates. Back then, that was enough to let it go, but today is a different day, in a different time with a different mindset, so I did what any inquisitive mind does, and asked the Google overlords why people still hated Adam Sandler and his movies. The first hit was a listicle, which is part of the cancer that is killing not only the English language, but the modern web on the whole, but I don’t have time for that today, so we’ll take a look at the second hit:

Good on you, CheatSheet. (1)

I included the sidebar to Cheat Sheet’s article because it’s the most important part of the article. This is because Cheat Sheet is one of the those new ‘websites’ that exists solely to provide ‘critique’. I say ‘critique’ and ‘website’ because Cheat Sheet isn’t so much a place where well-written analysis pieces are compiled together as it is another useless lump that solely exists to sell ads and distract you from being productive with your life with awful writing and unsubstantiated opinion. The site boasts about being heralded by Forbes, Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal and other big names in the news world despite only existing since 2011, but for as much time as I spend online reading news articles on these aforementioned websites and in general, I have never heard them mentioned once. Doing a search on Forbes for ‘Cheat Sheet’ only lists articles Forbes has written and posted that involve all sorts of investment or financial ‘cheat sheets’, but none of the named website. Might want to hold off on all that self-congratulatory back-patting, you shmucks. Then again, when one of your writers creates an article titled ‘3 Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make On Your Résumé’ and then have the first tip involve the cover letter, which is a completely separate entity from said résumé. When you can’t even title your own works properly, I can see why you’d want to high-five yourself for getting one single hit on a search engine.

The article from the screencap goes on to tell some story about how Rose McGowan, who is famous for being the third wheel on Charmed and for being one of the first people killed in Wes Craven’s Scream, got a casting call and it involved showing cleavage via push-up bra and form-fitting tank top.

Oh, burn. (2)

I get that Rose doesn’t want to be objectified, but fucking hell, you should at least make your tweet immaculate so that you don’t look like a jackass while you’re busy calling someone else a jackass. ‘hahahaha I die’? That’s definitely below the 140 character limit, including spaces, and you’ve been living in the US for years now, Rose. Get it together. Not only that, but ‘Madam Panhandler’? That shit isn’t even cute when kids do it to avoid tattling; you’re forty-fucking-two. If you’re going to call someone out, call them out. Don’t use bitchy teenager-level tactics that make you look like you flunked out of high school. Oh, wait.

What’s even more hysterical is that she’s bitching about a guy who, for decades now, has been handed awards and nominations for being a crass bastard and making millions despite having so many of his movies being critically destroyed, and all she has to show for over twenty years in the acting business is five years on Charmed. If I was as shitty as Rose McGowan, I would be begging to be in a Sandler film on the grounds I’d finally get to do real acting and make real money and laugh at all the critics who barely make five figures while I get checks for making what they believe is garbage. But, you know, gotta stand up for those principles while claiming to be an ‘artist’ despite not producing one goddamn piece of artwork your entire adult career. If acting were art, it would be called as such, you tool. Her last comments on the whole non-problem were as follows:

Hollywood really is where humor goes to die.

It is because of statements like this that I support minor criminal punishment for the spectacularly stupid.

If the idiocy of one has-been actress isn’t bad enough, the writer of the article goes full stop within moments of grabbing the reader:

The bias is so thick you’d need a chainsaw to cut it.

I enjoy the line ‘and make no one with an IQ in the double digits laugh’ because it immediately forces everyone reading to side with the author, regardless of what the reader’s actual opinion. That way, we never actually question or think about what Jacqueline Sahagian does throughout the rest of her piece; we’re already on her side, so everything she says has to be correct, right?

In the last five years, the Adam Sandler movies that have gotten any sort of media attention or slight advertising have absolutely crushed it at the box office. I think the worst one was Pixels, making only a 156% of the movie cost on the box office. I’m sure plenty of people will point out that a couple of other flops came out in that time, notably The Cobbler and Men, Women and Children, which is true. However, looking over his entire library of movies he’s either been involved with or acted in directly, he’s been absolutely killing it. Over the course of his entire movie career, works that he’s acted in, written or produced have collectively made over 5.5 billion dollars. Taking out all the known budget values and ignoring movies that don’t list full budget/box office data, the profiting from the man’s work is to the tune of 3.47 billion George Washington’s, with an a return rate (how much the movie makes over the budget) of around 250%. To further blow your mind on how good this man is at making money and making people around him money, The Waterboy‘s return rate was 808%. Eight-hundred-fucking eight. And the movie is just about a slow guy running around talking and dirty humor. Compare that to the modern marvel that is Guardians of the Galaxy, which is praised as one of the best movies in the last five years and one of the best superhero movies ever. It made a 395% return rate. Meanwhile, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 strolls on in and hits a 360% return rate, and it’s just a movie about a fat guy on a Segway.

‘But Sahltines, Guardians was great and had a way bigger budget!’ I hear you say. That’s my fucking point. Guardians should, by all accounts, be fiscially stomping all over a movie like Paul Blart, but it isn’t. You know why? Because Adam Sandler movies don’t rely on special effects to carry mediocre acting, and there aren’t fifty writers sitting around a table, all pitching shitty lines until they get that final great Starlord one-liner. They don’t have to constantly increase their budget with every new title because the audience will flog the movie if it doesn’t have enough flashy lights. Adam Sandler movies focus on snappy dialogue that features raunchy humor, offensive comebacks, quick witted retorts and asks exactly nothing of the viewer. Every single goddamn movie of his is simple and it’s predictable, but so are Super Mario games, and people buy those in droves despite the fact Nintendo hasn’t truly made anything new since Super Mario Galaxy (which is almost a decade old, mind you).

Now, despite all my points made thus far, which are pretty damn iron-proof, none of this has to do with the title, so it’s time I address that and wrap this up as this is getting long e-goddamn-nough as it is. There’s been a trend recently with websites like Cheat Sheet, The Daily Dot, The Washington Post and just about every ‘major news outlet’ (read: collection of blogs run by awful writers) where the word ‘gross’ is used to describe just about anything the author in question finds objectionable. I would say that, if the word was being used as it should, which is to begin to qualify the state of something, I wouldn’t be talking about this. Considering that I’ve made an article about it, that is obviously not the case. Take this:

You’re a fucking writer. Learn how to use the language properly.

You may have also noticed in the previous screencap that Sahagian also uses the term ‘gross’ to describe his practices. You may have also noticed she never once explains what she means by ‘gross’. You, as the reader, are left with two options: 1) Due to the word ‘gross’ carrying negative connotations, you impart your own belief based on that or 2) You are forced to infer from the tone of the article as to what Sahagian’s personal definition of ‘gross’ is. Since you, the reader, has to do all of the legwork, it’s really only one option since authors like Sahagian are perfectly fine with butchering the language, leaving the reader confused as to what’s being said and then betting on the fact that modern people cannot focus for very long, so they will give up trying to find meaning in what’s on the page and, instead, simply agree with the author because it’s way less mentally taxing. You then read the article and become incensed at how insensitive Adam Sandler, or how marginalized women are, or how terrible Men’s Right’s Activists are or whatever the author of one of these articles wants you to feel at the end of it, and throw all of those previous thought partitions you were using to figure out where the article went wrong and, instead, are now spending productive time trying to get people not to watch the next Adam Sandler movie or whatever the author wants.

I said at the beginning of this article that the English language is dying, and this is the core reason why. It’s not just that good websites with excellent critique are dying in favor of these shitty ad-covered agenda-spewing offense-creating factories, it’s not just that the average modern writer cannot use the language properly and posts drivel that is laden with grammar problems, shitty punctuation and no thought to the words on the page, it’s not the fact that the readers have become detrimentally disengaged from reading with a purpose and analyzing what’s being read to prevent author bias from taking over the opinion being formed by the reader, and it’s not just how these poor excuses for websites are laid out in a means to funnel you from one ad to the next and one time-wasting shit-listicle to another:

You linked the same fucking video twice. TWICE.

All of this garbage is what’s killing the English language and, by extension, the advancement of both modern writing and modern communication. Thanks to all this conditioning and politic-pushing, we’re becoming a society that’s going to give up it’s rights, freedoms, faculties and abilities just so we can sit in our own goddamn echo chamber all the time. Instead of real critics who assess based on years of experience, opinion and objective data, we’ll have ‘serious cultural critics’ who can only assess something based on the level of offense they take to it. What a fucking travesty.

The article finishes off by mentioning the recent flops that The Cobbler and Men, Women and Children were, stumbling over not knowing the meaning of the term ‘ensemble cast’, and essentially complaining that Pixels killed it at the box office, allowing Sanders to ‘sustain his career for many more years of offensive antics on and off the screen’. With that, we’ve finished this train wreck, and what have we learned? That Adam Sandler sucks? Well, that depends on your opinion of him, which is a subjective quantity, and of his movies, which is a subjective quantity as well. We certainly can’t say he sucks objectively, since he makes money hand over fist. We also can’t say we understand why the author thinks Sandler sucks because she spent the entire article bitching without explaining anything. We could say that we experienced another person’s opinion, but it wouldn’t be in any great detail because, again, no detail was put into that opinion; just a heaping of spite. We can’t leave a comment because, like all trashy article-dumping sites, there is no means to leave a comment. We could read another of the articles on the site, but considering how low the quality of this piece is and the other piece I mentioned here, do we even want to? Probably not.

To Jacqueline Sahagian, Cheat Sheet and all similar article dumping grounds out there: Adam Sandler is not gross, nor is his behavior. You are gross. You are gross because you are in the profession of writing, are being paid to write, and your material is filled with punctuation problems, poor prose, god-awful grammar and is nothing more than you pointless prattling on without ever getting to a point. You are gross because you use websites like Rotten Tomatoes as if all the opinion pieces it aggregates are fact, yet refuse to post accurate numbers because doing so would immediately destroy the agenda you are pushing. You are gross because you outright censor discussion and dissenting opinion by not letting readers comment on your tripe to ensure that you never get negative press so that you can sell the image you are a well-run, well-maintained and well-liked website despite anyone with half a functioning brain cell being able to see through the layers of bullshit you’ve caked on yourself like a protective coating. You’re so gross that you’re beyond gross; you’re pathetic, deplorable, disgusting and are a direct component in the machine that is slowly halting the growth of society and forcing it to abandon self-controlled and self-driven though in favor of having white noise-level opinions intravenoused into its brains. Fuck you.