A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Five-Hundred-And-Forty-Four

I decided to take a little break from working on my larger non-fiction project for tonight and began a new piece, one that I expect will be on the shorter side.  It is about the trend of having animals speak or write in broken and misspelled English.  I have always found this kind of thing a bit upsetting, but it took me a while to really understand my feelings about it.  I used to actually joke about how silly and dumb I thought these jokes were, considering how much more of a task it is to acquire language in the first place than learning to write properly.  It took me a very long while to recognize that, as a person with issues around reading and writing, and as someone who has been mocked and insulted as a result of those difficulties, I cannot help but think that these jokes are ableist.  To me, this is quite apparent, but I am having difficulty with explaining it, probably because it is something that I experience as an intuitive and emotional response, not as anything logical.  For me, the use seems to be a condemnation of the inability to communicate with greater fluency inherent in these pieces, as a reflection of the limited mental capacity of an animal, but is just stating that directly enough to make the point?

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