English like it should be spoken

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

Graham Lord

25 July 2007

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

Earlier this month there was a newspaper advertisement for the Möben fitted kitchen company that read ‘be amazed with over 30 beautiful kitchen styles’ when it should have read ‘be amazed by’ more than 30 styles.
In May the Daily Telegraph reported that Napoleon Bonaparte’s bedroom ceiling in Elba was ‘entirely covered in his personal symbol of the bee’. Covered in? Covered by or with, surely. Weirdest of all was this item about Lord Black’s trial in Chicago that appeared not just once but twice on the Times’s website on 18 June: ‘...if he is found to have wilfully blinded himself from a crime’.
Blinded himself from a crime? Blinded himself to a crime, I think. If even the Times — which used to boast of being ‘The Top People’s Paper’ — has sunk so low it’s perhaps less surprising that so many young
people today are barely literate.
There is, however, one consolation: the increasing arrival in Britain of hundreds of young immigrants from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia who all seem to speak our language much better than we do. They may yet help to rescue English from the English.

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Clare Flowers

January 21st, 2008 3:50pm Report this comment

Yes, yes, yes!

And what about the ad campaign for the Goldfish credit card, featuring various "celebs" including Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Meera Syal. It begins: "Me and my Goldfish went to ... " It gives me indigestion.