WITH ALL THIS WONDERFUL EQUIPMENT.
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The smartphone pictured at the end of my last post and the smart ipad shown above are not mine: though I greatly respect machine small talk's constant progressiveness, and am in awe of those who have mastered it, I do not yearn to be a part of it. And I do worry that it may concurrently be undermining our education system.
Recently on Jeremy Vine (Channel 5) the television show where Mr. Vine jumps up and down from his seat like a hypochondriac on a flight to Australia, the presenter made one of his irksome trips to a blackboard to regale us with the, clearly very modern, view that the apostrophe should be discarded from our language.
There is, he opined, no appreciable difference between 'your' and 'you're.'
The 'no swearing in this house' rule teetered wildly and, though I balk at insulting a guest in my home, I growled: "Do stop it. Your is one word, as in 'your middle-aged crisis is showing ' and you're is two words, as in 'you're talking a load of bollocks:' isn't that something you mostly do when the topic is bikes and cars?"
He didn't reply. I don't think he heard me.
Well I ain't goin' to ring 'im.
Perhaps, in an age when everything other than the medieval minds of some national leaders is subject to change, concern that our language is being crucified by ignorance masquerading as modernity will be dismissed by the change initiators as reactionary. But in accepting the bastardizing of English, surely we are both pandering to the idle and further undermining our oft unfairly criticised education system.
So do I have a particular axe to grind? Well...yes....
I did leave elementary school knowing only three (noun, verb, adjective) of the eight parts of speech. I did learn the others on a 'brush up your English' correspondence course opener at the age of twenty three. I did sit and proudly pass my sole GCE (English) when I was twenty six and otherwise taken up by a two terms 'change of career' course in bookkeeping at Clark's Commercial College, Southampton. I did have a column in the award winning Link W.H.A. newspaper for seventeen years. And I did complete sixteen years of this blog just four days ago.
Oh, let the technically forward be literally backward if it suits them, but don't use that as an excuse to wreck good English. Some of us have worked to put our words in the right place.
That's the end of the lesson.
It's footie now.
England v Germany. Women.
The 'no swearing in this house' rule teetered wildly and, though I balk at insulting a guest in my home, I growled: "Do stop it. Your is one word, as in 'your middle-aged crisis is showing ' and you're is two words, as in 'you're talking a load of bollocks:' isn't that something you mostly do when the topic is bikes and cars?"
He didn't reply. I don't think he heard me.
Well I ain't goin' to ring 'im.
Perhaps, in an age when everything other than the medieval minds of some national leaders is subject to change, concern that our language is being crucified by ignorance masquerading as modernity will be dismissed by the change initiators as reactionary. But in accepting the bastardizing of English, surely we are both pandering to the idle and further undermining our oft unfairly criticised education system.
So do I have a particular axe to grind? Well...yes....
I did leave elementary school knowing only three (noun, verb, adjective) of the eight parts of speech. I did learn the others on a 'brush up your English' correspondence course opener at the age of twenty three. I did sit and proudly pass my sole GCE (English) when I was twenty six and otherwise taken up by a two terms 'change of career' course in bookkeeping at Clark's Commercial College, Southampton. I did have a column in the award winning Link W.H.A. newspaper for seventeen years. And I did complete sixteen years of this blog just four days ago.
Oh, let the technically forward be literally backward if it suits them, but don't use that as an excuse to wreck good English. Some of us have worked to put our words in the right place.
That's the end of the lesson.
It's footie now.
England v Germany. Women.
Fingers crossed.
Say no more.
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