Competition: Major to Minor

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition

In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the plague of rubber bands visited on us by the Post Office. There is space only to congratulate Brian Murdoch, who gets £30. His fellow winners get £25 each.

Most will pass in silence over the 40th anniversary next year of a blow struck — and still felt — at the very heart of the culture of the nation. Yet one may still hear, from the august counters of Fortnum and Mason all the way down to the ubiquitous emporia of Tesco et hoc genus omne, references not to ‘one penny’, but — it pains us to utter the phrase — ‘one pence’. It is not, we feel, too far-fetched to see this barbaric but pervasive solecism, this manifest inability in a supposedly pluralist society to distinguish the plural from the singular, born out of Britain’s spineless capitulation to Europeanism in currency management, as the first sign of that phenomenon dubbed by the Americans a ‘dumbing down’ (as if there were any other direction in which ‘dumbing’ might occur!), a significant first step towards the present degradation of our entire education system.
Brian Murdoch

It seems to us that one largely overlooked instance of the deterioration of written and spoken English as commonly used is the impending disappearance of the who/whom distinction. Where relative pronouns are concerned, subject and object are one not only to the ill-educated ‘chav’ but even to many of those whose business is words.