Sir: Graham Lord (‘Is it a tough ask to speak proper English?’, 28 July) gives a clue to the increase in use of bad English when he points out that recent immigrants from eastern Europe speak our language much better than many of our own young people do.
English lessons
Sir: Graham Lord (‘Is it a tough ask to speak proper English?’, 28 July) gives a clue to the increase in use of bad English when he points out that recent immigrants from eastern Europe speak our language much better than many of our own young people do. The reason is that the incomers have been taught by people who think it important to use correct English. That does not apply to some teaching in our state school system today.
Jennifer Coates, Professor of English and Linguistics at Roehampton University, recently wrote in the TLS, ‘All linguistic researchers agree that it is not their task to prescribe how people should speak or write: the linguistician’s task is to describe language as it is actually used.’
David Crystal, author of more than 100 books on English, says people like Lynne Truss are equivalent to 19th-century quacks. He rejects prescriptivism as elitist, arising from the class-conscious belief that some people’s usage is better than others. He scornfully dismisses reformers he calls ‘Trussians’. This attitude is linked to the modern cult of being ‘non-judgmental’ and putting educated and uneducated speech on the same level of esteem, so as to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. There are other features of our modern society that can be linked to the problem about which Mr Lord so graphically complains.
Francis Bennion
Chairman Emeritus, Professional Association of Teachers,
Budleigh Salterton, Devon
Sir: Words change their meaning, but not all change is for the worse. We must discriminate. Disinterested is a loss. But the new meaning of decimate is surely a gain; it is hard to find any use for the old meaning. It is no use mourning the loss of prestigious (deceitful) unless you also mourn the loss of prestige (a trick or deceit); and who would do that? I am not sure what we gain by insisting on the distinction between fewer children and less sugar. We don’t have a similar distinction between more children and more sugar, and we do not feel its absence.
Must-have and do-able do not appear to me to be what Graham Lord calls ‘truly dreadful modern horrors’. They and 100 other examples mainly from America are pithy little packets of energy which show the vitality of the language.
John Harradine
Ardvasar, Island of Skye
Made in America
Sir: I am concerned that our two new aircraft carriers are to be equipped with US-supplied aircraft and Chinook helicopters, while the future replacement for the Royal Navy’s Trident submarine-borne ICBSs will also depend on US-supplied technology. Will not such dual dependence effectively bind us close into American world strategy? No doubt the French-built equivalents cost much more than buying off the shelf, and may well be technically inferior, but at least they are almost entirely French from factory to the field. This must surely strengthen French freedom of action in regard to global policy. It may well have proved a major factor in France’s wise decision not to join in George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq.
We should always remember that defence procurement is not a separate entity unto itself but an integral part of a nation’s ‘total strategy’.
Correlli Barnett
Norwich
Mosque meeting
Sir: I was astonished to read the article by Tom Gallagher last week (‘The SNP is playing a deadly game with Islam’), which is an ill-informed and offensive rant against Scotland’s Muslim community and government for pursuing an inclusive approach in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport.
He second-guesses what the First Minister said at a meeting in the Glasgow Central Mosque the day after the terrorist attack at the airport, apparently ignorant of the fact that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with Assistant Chief Constable John Neilson of Strathclyde Police, who had exactly the same inclusive and reassuring message, which went a long way to helping avert any backlash.
Ludicrously, Mr Gallagher suggests that the First Minster should ‘stay away’ from the reception to recognise all those involved in combating the terrorist attack, when it is the First Minister who is responsible for organising this very welcome development to bring people together! It would appear that Tom Gallagher neither knows Scotland’s Muslim community and the SNP, nor wants to know us. Scotland stands together united against terrorism, and we will not be divided.
Bashir Ahmad
MSP, Edinburgh
Munchausen’s muddle
Sir: Rod Liddle (‘Wakefield is probably wrong about MMR’, 21 July) admits to ‘limited medical knowledge’ and then proves it in an astonishing and disturbing way, for it seems he has completely misunderstood the nature of Munchausen’s by Proxy. He has confused mothers who murder with mothers who, through a series of complex and devious machinations, conspire to inflict upon their children the symptoms and signs of disease so as to invite fruitless and damaging investigation. Their reasons are ill understood but demand recognition to protect the child from a form of abuse that may be lethal. With others, Liddle has helped to destroy the reputation of a prescient physician, Professor Sir Roy Meadows, who was the first to draw to our attention to his reluctant conclusion that the mother who he had always assumed to be his natural ally in the care of their mutual responsibility, the sick child, could occasionally be the agent of its distress.
Dr David Murray FRCP
Huntingdon, Cambs
Not the only fruit
Sir: It’s good to scoff at the EU, but can there be an end to the vexatious and piffling insistence that the tomato is a fruit (Letters, 28 July)? Botanically speaking it is, but so are chillies, capsicums, French beans, aubergines, courgettes and all the other squashes. Next, I’ll get on to ‘Islam is a religion of peace’.
David Parker
New Malden, Surrey
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