Piece has been declared

Background

The anonymous offering below served as a reminder that learning English is undoubtedly a challenge and also serves as partial background to this addition to the Random Thoughts series:

We'll begin with box; the plural is boxes But the plural of ox is oxen, not oxes. One fowl is a goose, and two are called geese?Yet the plural of moose is never called meese

You may find a lone mouse or a house full of mice but the plural of house is houses, not hice. The plural of man is men,??but the plural of pan is never pen.

If I speak of a foot, and you show me two feet, and I give you a you a book, would a pair be a beek???If one is a tooth and a while set are teeth why shouldn't two booths be called a beeth?

If the singular's this and the plural is these??should the plural of kiss ever be keese?

We speak of a brother and also of brethren, but though we say mother, we never say methren. Then the masculine pronouns are he, his, and him; But imagine the feminine....she, shis, and shim!

Introduction

?“Sorry but you are well funded blame your hospitals manager’s for all the waist more money you get the more the waist”?????????????????????Frederick Hawksby, On Twitter, June 2022

As with buses apparently, pronouncements or announcements that stimulate a train of thought arrive in threes – Mr (which I assume to be his pronoun – slipped in to demonstrate my up-to-date, trendy credentials) Hawksby started to set the agenda for this latest piece in the panoply of Random Thoughts; his Twitter post almost coincided with a university’s announcement that grammar is no longer important and a professor who proclaimed that spelling really does not matter.?If neither grammar nor spelling appear on the league table of communication importance, then the poor old apostrophe must surely disappear without trace.?Although Hawksby clearly intended to talk of waste rather girth, did he really mean only one manager or should he have opted for managers’??Who knows??But such a trivial observation does highlight the different challenges between written and oral communication.?In the spoken word, spelling is not an issue and the deployment of nuance can help to eliminate confusions that can sometimes arise from, say, splitting infinitives.?However, in writing it is surely the case that spelling is hugely important, particularly on medical prescriptions.

Another recent spin-off of trendy thinking has been the declaration by an academic that “Studies have shown, however, that swearing may in fact display a more, rather than less, intelligent use of language”.?To a mere ignoramus such as this author, his claim seems totally counter intuitive.?There was ignorant me thinking that those who swear repeatedly have a limited vocabulary which is not usually an indicator of intelligence – the persistent use of the ‘F’ word suggests a lack of adjectival options.

Before moving on, allow me to make it clear that I am not picking on Hawksby and am equally guilty of typing the right sounding word in the wrong context as are others like this contributor to the web site Nextdoor:?“Too early evenings now a truck has parked…..” – sound alikes of: to, too, two offer a triple whammy of potential confusion.?It also needs to be recognised that predicted Text too often leads an author down the wrong garden path.?The truth is we are all in a hurry which means we skim the writings of others and respond quickly from the hip without bothering to review our own output.?Today we instinctively know all the answers and adopt the stance of ‘I am right, you are wrong’ – myself included.?Who cares about facts and learning when, according to a recent study, most of the young want leadership training rather learning a trade or studying for profession??The inverted pyramid of the modern, progressive (ugh) world in which opinion and overrated self-belief rule the day – no wonder our society succumbs to the wishes of the vast array of minority views mouthed on social media and protest march megaphones.

It is customary for a disclaimer to be attached to any of these widely unread articles in the Random Thoughts series - so here goes.?At the age of thirty eight years a General taught me the difference between appraise and apprise and, at the age of fifty two years, I Iearned how to pronounce awry while somewhere in between those years I discovered the difference between discrete and discreet.?Praise be that my ignorance is shared by others, for example on 15th July 2022 a Sky News Anchorman introduced a Warrant Officer Class 2 as serving in the Intelligence Corpse.?In my defence however, other than a mutual admiration for Winnie-the-Pooh with my father, childhood reading aloud with my parents was minimal, so inaccurate pronunciation went uncorrected since they were never heard; this caused much embarrassment in later life.?Against such a background of knowledge lacunas it is accepted that readers are unlikely to pay too much attention to the views expressed in this piece.

Both written and oral communication offer pitfalls, particularly for those struggling to learn English.?Consider such a conversation as this:

Questioner:?“What do you do?”??Responder:?“I practise medicine”?Questioner: “Practise??Why - don’t you get it right?

[NB.?Practise, Verb.?Practice, Noun - except in the USA where practice is the only option for both uses.?Dear old America who does not allow for a differentiation between routeing and routing or meter and metre.?Still, courtesy of the BBC, America is winning the language war with most of Aunty’s reporters talking of skedules]

So, with the intervention of academics in the area of communication, has a position now been reached where it can be declared that?:

During the rain of Queen Elizabeth II, universities decided that spelling, punctuation and grammer ceased to bee important.?This delighted electricians reading metres and athletes competing in the 400 meters hurdle race as well potential university students, including those living in Whales.?Meanwhile in the field of meteorology, talk of rein mite remind some of those wonderful lyrics from the musical My Fare Lady (not to be confused with the TV offering On The Buses in which passengers paid their fairs):

The reign in Spain?- Lands mainly on the plane

In future, Examination Boreds will presumably take a lenient vue of pore grammer since Tony Blare considers it very important for 75% of the young to attend university thereby improving there urning potential via such subjects as media studys and human writes.?Weather this shift in emphasis will trigger an examination of academic skedules remains to bee scene and their may even bee a need to restructure certain graduate coarses.?

In another bold move to dumb down the nuances of communication, there is a plot afoot to expunge Latin from common usage which prompted Julian Fellowes (Daily Telegraph 13th June 2022) to observe that: “People ‘infantilised’ by Latin phrase diktat”. So, for this great leap down, it is presumably a sine qua non (an essential condition) to say farewell, inter alia (among other things), to such useful terms as ultra vires (acting or done beyond one's legal power or authority), mea culpa (acknowledging one's fault or error), carpe diem (make the most of the present time aka seize the day).?Will this misguided ban on utilising Latin be extended to other imports that have penetrated everyday English such as de rigueur and other French offerings that enliven our menus such as moules mariniere or coq au vin.??Where will such draconian thinking end??Are we to say a fond farewell to Indian imports such as bungalow?

It’s hard to understand the objection to utilising foreign language words and phrases that simplify our communication lives.?So much easier, surely, to say de rigueur rather than ‘something or act required by etiquette or current fashion’.?It would be of interest to know if the purveyors of the dumbing down recommendations have thought through the inevitable Impact on Crossword clues, insurance policies, legal documents, school mottos and the naming of flora and fauna.

Rules

“An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country”??Henry Wotton

It seems perverse that some parts of academia – the illiberal liberals rather than the scientists and other disciplines that deal in facts – should, on the one hand dismiss the need for rules of grammar and spelling while on the other, happily ban presentations or writings that might offend the teachings of Cancel Culture or some newly contrived woke offence.?Rules, for example, sustain diplomacy, reduce road, aircraft and shipping accidents and save us from electrocution when rewiring a plug.?Laying aside the scientific or other more factual fields of endeavour in which, I assume, many rules are immutable, rules are challengeable, to the great and prosperous delight of the legal profession.?Even in the Army we sent quality Senior Non Commissioned Officers on a Quartermaster’s Course to teach them how to break the rules legally, in the interests of the Commanding Officer’s career and the morale of the soldiers.???

Not renowned for his obedience as I recall, Talleyrand opined that “Only fools make fun of etiquette; it simplifies life”.?I guess there is a terminological overlap between etiquette and good manners but both seem to be either frowned upon in our brave new world, or are considered fertile ground either for dumping or for re-defining to suit the shrill demands of modern minorities, or indeed the state system (eg, on 18th June 2022 a potential male blood donor being obliged to answer whether he is pregnant or not).?Small but inoffensive societal rules allowed my generation to lead an uncomplicated childhood, happily bereft of unsolicited information on sex or gender.?For example letters to me were addressed to:

Master Michael Nicholson.?So everyone, including myself, knew that I was a brat resting at the bottom of the food chain with no privileges (as with holidays abroad, rights had not been invented then) and was required to address any older male as “Sir”.

Such an appellation distinguished me from my sister who was addressed thus:

Miss Penelope Nicholson.?An unmarried female who, to those in the know, lay slightly higher up the food chain than Master Michael.

At the theoretical top of the food chain lay Mr John Nicholson – a bloke; back then he might have been addressed as Commander but post-1993 when the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) disbanded it is now a gender neutral rank so if used, clarity would be lost.?And the leading player on the distaff side was Mrs Adèle Nicholson – very definitely a woman but one who sometimes faced particular communication challenges, memorably publicly confusing ‘abortion’ with ‘aversion’, ‘ravishing’ with ravenous’ and ‘testicle’ with ‘tentacle’.

At the time I was disinterestedly trudging through an undistinguished ‘academic career’ in the 1950s and early 1960s, eschewing a go at the Eleven Plus and performing dismally in the Common Entrance Examination stakes (or is it steaks?!), the Graduate community stood at circa 8% of the population.?Being such a small proportion of the nation inevitably meant that most of us were in awe of the cleverness of Graduates; furthermore, their Degrees seemed to be taken in intellectually demanding subjects.?Graduates, wrapped in a burgeoning knowledge base, were encouraged, via debating societies such as the Oxford Union, to think with originality, to express freely their views and to listen tolerantly to the views of others however distasteful they may have been.?So, for example, Sir Oswald Mosley was granted a platform at an Oxford University debate.

Universities today seem to have adopted a different hue (or is it hew or hugh?) in terms of the types of degrees, the tolerance of the views of others and an acceptance of freedom of speech.?In combination where has the difference led us??Well, one depressing illustration is the response of an employee of an academic institute, namely a university, to the achievements of Margaret Thatcher: Throwing eggs at her statue (rather insensitive at the apogee of a cost of living crisis but why would he care, after all he’s clever).?Such meanderings lead to a conclusion that I would love to have attended university sixty years ago but am mighty glad not to have gone to one in the twenty-first century.?Such gladness has been enhanced now that Humanities are being discarded by some universities for favour of a push towards STEM degree courses that will lead the young into money making careers; getting rich is considered to be the apogee of achievement here on Earth, although, in fairness, dosh is needed to pay back student loans.???

While universities seem to have lost interest in such matters as grammar and a knowledge of dates for students of history, issuing woke advice is gathering momentum. The University of Warwick, for example, has recently issued trigger warning of 'extreme classisism' to students who might be injudicious enough to read Mary Barton. Could that be the tip of a PC iceberg? After all the same university has issued a content warning for Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette on the grounds that it contains 'strong xenophobia and religious intolerance'. All is not however lost, with at least one academic fighting for the right not to demean students by issuing advice that insults their thinking capacity:

'Trigger warnings are a moralistic enterprise that is constantly looking for new targets to warn about" - Professor Frank Furedi, Kent University ?

In the context of the above example, it seems to me that any parent who retains any residual influence over their children, should encourage their progeny to attend Kent University rather than Warwick.

It is perverse perhaps that with a mind that is uncluttered with knowledge, untrained and lawless, I am in favour of rules although far from being a tuft hunter.?Perhaps, at heart, I am non-confrontational, for example I try not to split infinitives because I know their use upsets many – why knowingly do something that annoys others, particularly if they are senior to you which, apart from anything else represents poor career planning.?To complete these thoughts on the split infinitive, there is also a sound practical reason for avoiding its use, especially in the written context where oral nuance is lost.?Consider:

“He managed to effectively destroy the speaker’s argument” does that mean ‘in effect’ or ‘effectively’????

Of course I am too dim to take on board complex issues of grammar; explaining a gerund or the subjunctive or offering a view on an ablative absolute is quite beyond my skill-set.?I am willing, however, to abide by the simple ideas of avoiding tautology, not starting a sentence with an adverb and avoiding the split infinitive; indeed, I might even grasp the concept of the ascending tri-colon - I came I saw I conquered to wit, just to annoy the anti-Latin lobby, veni, vidi, vici.

Whereas some delight in breaking the rules, I cannot see the point in deliberately upsetting others, besides I am perfectly capable of so doing accidentally.?There is a suspicion that such ‘law breakers’ are the types who describe themselves as ‘a bit of a rebel with a GSOH’ or sport a beard to make their face more interesting (not currently an obvious option for certain pronouns but times are changing).

Although tautology can waste space in a written document or time in oral communication (eg, ‘razed to the ground’ rather than simply ‘razed’), a misunderstood word can have a more deleterious impact, by accident or ignorance.?Sailors abandoned the term 'larboard' centuries ago because, particularly in a howling gale, it was too often confused with 'starboard'.?Misunderstandings through ignorance can have deadly or near deadly consequences such as the assault on a paediatrician by a lynch mob that had assumed paediatrician equated to paedophile.

Conclusions

Could it be that universities are pushing an agenda down a slippery slope that risks introducing the twin penalties of diminishing the quality of learning on offer while curtailing freedom of speech.?With regard to the latter this statement is less than encouraging: “Freedom of speech is at risk of being stifled at universities after a record number of speakers and events were rejected last year, the higher education watchdog has said” – Daily Telegraph, 15th July 2022.?The inclination to bear down on freedom of speech was made clear in the article by the inclusion of criticism for daring to suggest that George Floyd had a criminal record.

Although Thomas Carlyle suggested that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind”, some rules of spelling and grammar are necessary to ensure some precision in both oral and written communication.