To blog or not to blog

What to do with a wet Wednesday that holds all the promise a bowl of soggy muesli? It’s there; you just have to wade your way through it, knowing that eventually it’ll be gone and maybe, just maybe, things will improve. It’s hard to be enthusiastic, effervescent and charming when you’re knackered. I didn’t sleep well, as is sometimes the case. I don’t know if this happens to you, but I can lie there for a while, life buzzing through my head, thinking about things I need to do the next day, crusades to be fought, cooking to be cooked, and I am fine, starting to drift, feeling a little dopey, nicely relaxing. And then I get an itch, or a cough, or go all sneezy and I’m wide awake again, not sleepy and that is the point of no return. Once I’ve had that thought then there is no going back. And when I’m not sleepy, by definition I tend to not be happy either and get quite grumpy, made no easier by my apparent dwarf fetish – I’d go see the Doc about it, but I’m too bashful!

Last night, while trying to sleep, I was waging a personal battle and trying to work out exactly where I stand on a particular topic. In the end I had to admit defeat and agree to disagree with myself.  It is a real dilemma when you can see both sides of an argument, made worse by the fact that supporting either side with any degree of conviction can result in social stigma, rejection, hatred and possibly the daubing of a red cross on our front door. But we’re friends here right? I can confide in you? You’ll stick by me through thick and thin? As Shakespeare once quoth:

“Love is not love that alters
when it alteration finds”

Will you still love me? Deep breath. Here goes: It is grammar and the use of the English language that is bothering me. There is a huge part of me that believes that the degradation in literary and spoken standards is a bad thing. I’m a pedant when it comes to English. I get annoyed when I see inappropriately used punctuation, badly composed sentences, rules broken and structure disassembled. I shudder if I pass a greengrocer’s shop with a notice saying “Potatoe’s on special offer” or “Kid’s shoes on sale”; are they really selling the shoes belonging to a single child?  I refuse to use a supermarket checkout marked, “10 items or less”, when they really mean fewer. “There were less people at the match today.” Really? In what way were they less, of a more lowly background perhaps or maybe they were all below average height?

I risk the danger of re-writing “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” here, and my inner-stickler is nowhere near as honed as that book requires, but really, sometimes I do get quite frustrated. So many people just seem to not care about grammar these days, and I find that to be a terrible shame. There is a photo I saw on the internet the other day of a sign displayed by Susan Boyle’s neighbours in anticipation of her return from “Britain’s Got Talent”, which read, “Susan your a super STAR in our EYE’S WELL DONE”. One has to commend the intention, but condemn the execution.  I think they meant to write, “Susan, you’re a superstar in our eyes. Well done.” Even allowing for an intentional reference to “Stars in their eyes” they could perhaps have managed, “Susan, you’re a super ‘Star In Our Eyes’. Well Done”.  Maybe I sound snobby, and I risk being branded for a high and mighty attitude, lording it over people who know no better, but our language is such a critical part of our lives, it is a tool that has such power and creativity, and misusing it is on a par with daubing the Mona Lisa with Emulsion or playing a Mozart concerto off key. I’m not angry with the people who misuse language, just with the system that has left them not knowing any better. Surely in this day and age there is no excuse for anyone leaving school without an understanding of the basic rules of punctuation? The state is letting people down, and it matters. It is not snobby to want to see the correct use of bus, bus’s, buses and buses’. (Singular bus, belonging to a bus, more than one bus and belonging to more than one bus.)

We have these rules for a reason. A punctuation mark tells us so much. It expresses ownership, where to stress a sentence where to take a pause, where to breathe. Consider: “Let’s eat, Harry” and “Let’s eat Harry”. The punctuation mark gives us a clear understanding of what is meant and avoids confusion. So why not use these dots and squiggles correctly?

I see red when people use ‘into’ incorrectly. “I am going into the bank”, or “I am going in to deposit some money”, but not “I am going into deposit some money”.  And when did ‘upto’ become a word? My pet hate at the moment is the use of ‘invite’ as a noun. Please feel free to send me an invitation, or to invite me to your party, but I suspect you may struggle if trying to post me an invite, as nouns are notoriously difficult to coax into envelopes!

In one of my earliest blogs I told of a letter I had written to Sainsbury’s (note their trade name does take the apostrophe, whereas no apostrophe is associated with Marks and Spencer, but they have cheated and started to call themselves M&S anyway). This letter complained about a television advertisement for new potatoes and an offer which would be available “for a few short weeks”. This was perfect bull vs. red rag territory for me and so I wrote asking what right Sainsbury’s had to truncate the length of our weeks, from exactly which part of the week they intended to subtract time (explaining that if they had to shorten the week I would prefer they did that between 0900 and 1700 on a Monday through to a Friday, leaving the weekends unadulterated), whether they would give us the stolen time back at a later stage or whether this was a cunning plan to fiddle with the laws of relativity. To their credit, I received a suitably tongue-in-cheek reply and I think they got my point. An advertisement on national televisions, seem by millions of people, from a company as influential as Sainsbury’s should at very least employ correct use of our language.

On the subject of TV ads, I do enjoy the ones which proclaim that “Nothing works faster than [product X]”. So use nothing; it is cheaper and it works faster! And, “Nothing makes the sun safer”; no shit! It is a boiling maelstrom of super-heated gasses; suntan cream won’t make the sun safer. The best you can hope for is that it may protect you from the sun’s harmful radiation.

Ill-considered language in commercial advertising is nothing new though; it has been a slippery slope from the days when Beanz Meanz Heinz. Is it any wonder that spelling standards are falling? Weetabix in not much better. And less said about Nutz magazine the best I think.

There is a café we passed the other day which proclaimed, “New opening hour’s” and also has a list of “Todays Special’s”. Never-the-less, it is gratifying to know that they are now “Open Sunday’s til 23:00pm”!  Does anybody ever proof-read this stuff? Does anybody care? Are children not taught the basic rules of grammar anymore? I am no linguistic expert, I don’t have qualifications in the subject beyond O’Level but I do know the difference between they’re and their, I understand the positioning of the possessive apostrophe (most of the time) and I like to think I have some ability to inject commas, colons and semi-colons in roughly the right places. I welcome any of you to inspect my colon use, and let me know if you see an inappropriately placed semi-! I mentioned the possessive apostrophe before and admit that it can be a bit confusing. If the car belongs to the Jones family is it the Jones’ car or the Jones’s car? Are they collectively the Joneses?

Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses

The house of Mr Jones = Mr Jones’(s) house

The house of Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses’ house

‘Keeping up’ with the practices or possessions of Mr and Mrs Jones = Keeping up with the Joneses

English throws us all sorts of challenges to keep us on our toes, especially since it borrows words from different languages and is a compound of many different roots. Technically it is a West Germanic language (Dutch, Afrikaans, Low German, High German), with a good smattering of Norse, Viking and Norman for colour and a fair peppering of Latin and Greek. No wonder even the English get it wrong! Consider words such as sense, age, clue, direction or hope; these can all be negated with the addition of the suffix ‘less’, so hopeless, ageless and so forth, but what about “ruthless”, meaning cruel, callous, without mercy? Who killed off Ruth? She sounded nice! Someone who is not inept isn’t said to be ept. What is the opposite of dishevelled, shevelled? Would one mantle something that has been dismantled? I used to be disgruntled, but now I’m perfectly gruntled. What do you have to be doing to be frivolous? I demand the introduction of the word ‘frivle’ with immediate effect! I want to be able to go into a room and start to frivle.  Exceed has no opposite, which seems a bit unfair in respect of traffic offences where you can be fined for exceeding a speed limit but those dithering Sunday drivers who always drive far slower than necessary don’t even have a word for what they are doing! And we have those blessed words that take opposite meanings depending on their context:

• to clip: to cause to be together; to cause to be apart
• to consult: to give advice; to receive advice
• fast: not moving; moving
• to lease: in exchange for money, for a time to give up possession of; to gain possession of
• a strike: a hit; a miss
• to wind up: to start; to finish

Another word to avoid, especially if you are advertising an event, is bimonthly; it means ‘twice a month’ or ‘every two months’; ditto biweekly and biyearly.

Sometimes the rules just get out of hand; ‘uni’ generally relates to a singular aspect of an item, unicycle, unicorn, but not in respect of unisex, where both genders are involved!

We use once, twice and thrice, but thereafter the pattern stops, but not so with primary, secondary, tertiary, where the sequence continues quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary – I bet you didn’t know that!

We can’t even stick to basic rules about plurals; you can’t assume that ‘s’ on the end of an object will turn it into more than one:

cow becomes cows;
pig becomes pigs;
but what about the sheep in the field? How many, one or more?

Conversely, what about all the things that already carry an ‘s’ at the end? Bellows, binoculars, forceps, gallows, glasses, pliers, scissors, shears, tongs, braces, briefs, flannels, jeans, knickers, pants, pyjamas, shorts, tights, trousers. ‘Scissors’ is a word guaranteed to fry the brain of anyone who considers it for too long. If I have one of these items, should I say, “The scissors is in the drawer”, or “The scissors are in the drawer”? Maybe I try to circumvent the problem with. “I have a pair of scissors in the drawer”, but even that could mean that there are two of them.

I was once challenged (and failed) to come up with a sentence which contained the word ‘and’ five times in succession, with no intervening words. It had to obey the laws of grammar and make sense. The answer was as follows: The sign-writer had left no space between “Pig” and “And”, and ‘”And” and “Whistle”.

There is a (probably apocryphal) story of a bar in Kentucky or somewhere with a sign “Ladies Welcome. Liquor in the front, Poker in the Rear.” At least that brings a smile to the face.

I cringe when I see Americanised versions of our words, such as color and favorite. I can forgive them for creating their own words for things, with lorry becoming truck, a chemist becoming a drugstore, a dual carriageway becoming a freeway and a pavement turning into a sidewalk. Even lift to elevator is okay by me, since we used to call them rising rooms so have no cause to complain. But why do they butcher so many of our words for no reason?

colour > color
humour > humor
favourite > favorite
theatre >  theater
kilometre > kilometer
cosy > cozy
realise > realize
dialogue > dialog
traveller > traveler
cheque > check
jewellery > jewelry
tyre > tire

In England we go to hospital, we do NOT get hospitalized, although that is a term that seems to be creeping into general usage, along with many other ‘-ize’ bastardisations.

But herein is my dilemma: Language has to be allowed to evolve or else it dies. Words are constantly being re-worked to have different meanings. The obvious example is the word ‘gay’, which have moved from meaning ‘happy and jovial’ to ‘homosexual’ and even now seems to be mutating further to mean ‘bad’. When the yoof [sic] of today say, “That’s gay”, they just mean ‘bad’ and probably don’t even reference ‘homosexual’ in their thinking at the time. I can’t hear ‘gay’ without the ‘queer’ associations, but I genuinely believe the meaning is moving on from that. Language does that, it messes with meaning, sometimes to the point when the original sense is totally reversed. Something that is wicked these days is good. This is not a new phenomenon; try these words that have reversed their original meanings:

Artificial
This originally meant ‘full of artistic or technical skill’. Now its meaning has a very different slant.

Nice
This comes from the Latin ‘not to know’. Originally a ‘nice person’ was someone who was ignorant or unaware.

Awful
This meant ‘full of awe’ i.e. something wonderful, delightful, amazing. However, over time it has evolved to mean exactly the opposite.

Manufacture
From the Latin meaning ‘to make by hand’ this originally signified things that were created by craftsmen. Now the opposite, made by machines, is its meaning.

Prove
Originally this meant to test. The old meaning survives in the phrase ‘proving ground’.

Tell
Its original meaning was ‘to count’, which is how we came by the term ‘bank teller’.

God alone knows what qualities to expect from something that is claimed to be cool, hot, bad, or even radical!

So often I hear data used incorrectly – data is the plural of datum, so “the data is correct” should really be, “the data are correct” or, if a single piece of information then, “the datum is correct”.  We do the same mangling to media (plural) so we should talk about the newspaper medium as being one type of a larger group of media.  We play sports in one stadium or several stadia (not stadiums although again, this is now becoming a more widely accepted pluralisation).  In the same way I get stressed about the plural of cannon, for which the rules seem to be changing. A cannon is a piece of artillery, a big gun. The plural is also cannon, in the same way as aircraft drops the ‘s’ when found in multiples. These days you will hear reporters telling you they hear the sound of ‘cannons’ firing in the distance and I wonder if I have any right to demand the language should not adopt this form. Maybe with language there is no right or wrong, just current use, whether that deviates from accepted rules or not.

I hate txt spk to my core and thankfully it does seem to be dying a pretty rapid death, as mobile phones offer increasingly sophisticated predictive text and reduced prices for messages, so there is no longer the call for the same degree of brevity. I am delighted though that Twitter does not seem to fall foul of txt spk too much, despite the limitations of 140 characters per message. It is an interesting discipline to try to convey news, feelings, concepts in such a restrictive space and yet few seem to resort to abbreviation beyond the occasional ‘&’. These days there is just no excuse for poor spelling, with spell-checkers attached to every type of technology. MS Word will help you with grammar, correct mis-spelt words and even suggest alternatives via its synonym and thesaurus technology. So if you can’t spell, run it through a word processor first! That said, beware and remember to proof-read everything at least twice. In earlier versions of Word my surname was auto-corrected the Pervert and therein lies a tale or two.

We add new words all the time, mostly derived from technological advances, such as blog and blogosphere, but did you know that these have also now mutated into Vlog (a video-blog) plus Vlogosphere and you can watch a Webisode of a ‘programme’ made especially for web-release? You can take a staycation, which is a holiday taken at home, and you might do this with a frenemy – one who pretends to be a friend but is actually an enemy.  On your staycation you might become a locavore – one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible.  To google is now a recognised verb in the Collins English Dictionary, but has yet to make it to the OED. I suspect that Twitter will soon receive its own recognition soon, with new definitions for Tweet and possibly the inclusion of Twitterati!

There are a few words that I think should be added to the dictionary. In big department stores quite often the escalators going up are in a different location to the ones going down, so I think clarification should be provided by the introduction of upscalator and downscalator.

My niece once came up with a brilliant new word.  She was asked to make a round of teas and coffees, with people giving their ‘orders’ as she wrote them down on a pad, being a proper waitress. She put sugar in my tea, which I hate, and so I asked her if she knew she had done this. She checked her pad and looked up at me, and sad, rather guiltily, “I’m sorry Uncle Adrian, I must have misunderheard”.

I’ll not delve too deeply into the issues I have with the way we write numbers these days! 24/7 is 3.428 and please will someone tell me, how long is 3.5 minutes? Is that 210 seconds (3 1/2 minutes) or 230 seconds (3 minutes and 50 seconds)? I guess THAT is a debate for another day!

So you see I am torn between a desire to maintain the traditions and structure of English as I was taught it, full sympathy for anyone trying to make sense of it, and a recognization [sic] that we need  to embrace a language that needs to change, adapt and grow. What is wrong and what is right? Language is a tool of courtesy. It has been created to aid understanding. Punctuation is about clarification, making sure the meaning is unambiguous. To not bother with such things is discourteous and, in some cases, dangerous. Evolution with courtesy, and if error is inevitable, let it at least be through ignorance rather than laziness. Oh, and will someone give the National Curriculum a kick up the arse and bring back a few of the old values. As Winston Churchill once said, “That is the type of grammar up with which I will not put, innit”!