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Sunday 22 November 2009

English like it should be spoken

Is it, like, such a tough ask to speak proper English?

We all know that correct English is no longer taught in most of our schools, but now at last the government seems to agree.

Nobody under the age of 40, for instance, even in middle-class families, would dream nowadays of saying ‘my friend and I went down to the pub’: now it’s ‘me and my friend’ or ‘her and myself gone dahn a boozer’.
Nobody under the age of 40 ever uses the words ‘said’ or ‘says’ any more: it’s always ‘go’, ‘is’ or ‘went’: ‘So ’im and me goes dahn a boozer an’ ’e’s like, “Hey, man, check the babe in the corner!” an’ I go, “**** me! I’m in love,” an’ ’e went, “Hands off, man, I saw her first” so I’m like, “Too bad, man, she’s mine.”’
Carelessness about our beautiful language is sprouting everywhere, even among the allegedly intelligent. Sheer ignorance, for instance, has changed the word ‘disinterested’, which means neutral or unbiased but is now widely used to mean ‘uninterested’. ‘Decimated’ means ‘reduced by one tenth’ but is now used constantly to mean ‘obliterated’. Originally ‘prestigious’ meant dodgy or deceitful but most people nowadays seem to think that it means ‘full of prestige’.
Such irritations, however, are insignificant by comparison with some truly dreadful modern horrors: the nouns (like gift) that are now being used as verbs; the ‘must-have’ gadgets; the BBC Wimbledon commentator who remarked that the challenge faced by one player ‘was a tough ask’ but another was ‘do-able’.
A couple of days later BBC News 24’s chief political correspondent, James Landale, reported that the job of the new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, was also ‘a big ask’, and Sky TV’s cricket commentator Nasser Hussein, a graduate of Durham University, remarked that the West Indian batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul had just played his side’s ‘stand-out innings’ — and he said it again, twice, a few days later [1 July]. He meant ‘outstanding’.

What is truly depressing about this decline in the use of the language is that it has now spread even to the very people who should be upholding and defending it: professional authors, writers, journalists and broadcasters.
On 27 May, I’m sorry to say, even the Spectator’s Rod Liddle, a master of English, reported in his Sunday Times column that John Prescott’s farewell tour of America and the Caribbean was paid for ‘by you and I’ instead of ‘by you and me’.
On the same day in the Sunday Telegraph John Preston wrote in an interview with Charles Webb, the author of The Graduate: ‘He has no interest in money, and nor would he get any if Home School is made into a film.’ Why and nor?
In another issue of the Sunday Times the Emeritus Professor of Family Planning at University College London, John Guillebaud, remarked that ‘the greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.’ No, no, professor: it’s ‘one child fewer’.

Even last week’s Reform report which revealed that ‘less than half of children achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C’ should of course have referred to fewer than half, not less, but that’s how rotten the misuse of English has now become.
Dumbing down has become so widespread that nowadays newspapers keep hyphenating words unnecessarily so that couples no longer split up: they split-up, break-up or walk-out. Whatever next? Wake-up? Sit-up? Throw-up?
But of all the strange new linguistic-monstrosities that are increasingly-inflicted on us, perhaps the most-inexplicable is the plague of perplexing prepositions.
For years even people who ought to know better have been saying that they are ‘bored of’ something rather than ‘bored by’ or ‘bored with’ it. Last month Peter Mandelson, an Oxford graduate, was telling the press that he had become ‘bored of the gym’ and had now taken up yoga.

More articles from: Graham Lord | this section

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