Last week saw the launch of the Bad Grammar Awards, an annual contest in which prizes are handed out for poor English. Actually, ‘prizes’ is probably the wrong word since no one wants to win them.
No one, that is, apart from A.A. Gill. He entered himself and submitted a badly written email that he’d composed specifically. The judges, of whom I was one, considered this but ruled it out on the grounds that Gill would never write as badly as that for the Sunday Times. He may hate grammarians and their pedantic tribe — a point he was trying to make — but his newspaper columns are grammatically sound.
A journalist we spent longer on was Isabel Oakeshott, the Sunday Times political editor. In one of several emails she sent entreating Vicky Pryce to give the story about Chris Huhne’s speeding points to her paper, Oakeshott spelt ‘jeopardising’ and ‘licence’ as ‘jeapardising’ and ‘license’. But we concluded that these were fairly minor mistakes in a private correspondence.
An entry we took more seriously was the following notice that is currently displayed in several Tube stations: ‘It is safer to stay on the train than attempting to get off.’ As I’m sure sharp-eyed readers will have spotted, the mistake here is to use an infinitive and then a gerund, when it should be two infinitives or two gerunds. So Transport for London should either replace the first half of the sentence with ‘It is safer staying on the train…’ or the second half with ‘…than to attempt to get off.’
Another contender for the main prize was the text of a recent Tesco ad: ‘Enjoy the taste of England. Working with local producers to bring you a wider range of seasonal locally sourced products. Every little helps.’
The judges felt that ‘Enjoy the taste of England’ was just about acceptable, but thought the second sentence should have a comma after ‘seasonal’ and ‘locally sourced’ should be hyphenated to make it clear that ‘sourced’ is what is being qualified by the adverb ‘locally’. ‘Every little helps’, while a common phrase, is incorrect because ‘little’ is not a noun.
However, after careful consideration the judges decided to award first prize to the letter from 100 ‘educationalists’ that appeared in the Guardian and the Independent earlier this year attacking Michael Gove’s new National Curriculum. With supreme irony, the authors of the letter argued it would be a mistake to teach children ‘endless lists of spellings, facts and rules’, even though they had benefited from a more formal, Gradgrindian education themselves.
In a tour de force, the letter was filleted by Neville Gwynne, author of Gwynne’s Grammar and the head judge, who described it as one of the worst examples of written English he’d ever read.
Take the following sentence: ‘Little account is taken of children’s potential interests and capacities, or that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity.’ The authors intend the phrase ‘little account is taken of’ to apply to ‘children’s potential interests and capacities’ as well as ‘that young children need’, but trying to apply it to the second clause renders the sentence gobbledygook: ‘Little account is taken of… that young children need…’ The second clause of the sentence refers to the need of ‘children’ ‘to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity’, but if it’s ‘children’ plural, why ‘experience’ singular rather than ‘experiences’ and ‘activity’ rather than ‘activities’?
Drawing attention to the grammatical shortcomings of the letter may strike some people as petty — a form of snobbery, even — but it is not elitist to try to teach all children the rules of good grammar, as the authors of the letter claim. On the contrary, if grammar continues to be taught in fee-paying schools but is neglected in state schools, the products of independent schools will continue to have a competitive advantage when it comes to getting into Russell Group universities and securing a foothold in the professions. Teaching all children ‘lists of spellings, facts and rules’, and not just the children of the rich, is actually a far more egalitarian approach than the more loosey-goosey one favoured by the left-wing educationalists.
A.A. Gill, who dropped out of school, may have had no need of a formal education because he was brought up in an educated household and surrounded by books. But children born on a council estate, particularly those hoping to write for the Sunday Times one day, most certainly do.
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