John: How we learned to mind our language

Jan 21 2010 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THERE are two popular misconceptions about language.

The first is that a thorough knowledge of your own tongue makes you articulate.

The second is that being articulate makes you intelligent.

Women speak on average three times more words each day than men, so if the logic followed through, and assuming they used those words in an articulate fashion, that would make women three times more intelligent than men ...

You see, that’s the kind of thinking that gets you into trouble with half the population straight away.

I’m living proof that knowing one’s own language is no guarantee of intellect.

I can hold forth at great length on any number of subjects and it’s mostly rubbish – just perfectly formed rubbish.

Nevertheless it’s scary to see standards of English dropping, as they surely and universally are.

This is not exactly large-scale illiteracy – though Britain may be heading in that direction – just abuse and neglect of one of the greatest potential sources of delight in the civilised world.

The same applies, of course, to every language, not just English, lest I appear overly Anglophile.

I think we should take pride, however, in the fact that our native language has far and away more words than any other, and is therefore potentially more expressive than any other.

There appears now, in this country at least, to be no pride in mastering grammar, spelling and punctuation, and no ready source, other than a few university linguistic departments, to which one can run for instruction.

It would be wonderful to be able to say that newspapers remained a bastion of ‘correct’ English, but of course they are not.

In the last 30 years, the volume of words any newspaper processes per edition has doubled, while the number of pairs of watchful eyes it employs has fallen.