English Spelling, aaaaaah, what a lark!
However, before we start to share out our cyanide capsules, perhaps we should pause. I, for one, am heartened to hear that people are looking things up in dictionaries at all. Over the past few months, I have been told repeatedly that "everyone" now relies on spell-checker programs, just as they rely on grammar checkers for their punctuation.
Whenever I have pointed out that spell-checkers are inferior to dictionaries because, when you look up a word in a dictionary, you get a definition as well, I have met with pitying looks. Yet evidently - Hooray! - there are still a few people willing to drag that heavy tome off the shelf and discover that "pour" may sound very much like "pore", but is actually a completely different word.
Does it matter that people spell correctly? Well, the pour/pore example is a pretty good place to start, actually. Write, "I have been pouring over my books" and you will find it leads to tricky extra questions, such as, "Pouring what?"
Yet there is an idea steadily gathering force in this country that communication should be judged only by functional effectiveness and that, if you "get the gist" of what someone is saying, this is enough. Notions of "correct" English are for fuddy-duddies who take nasty pleasure in other people's mistakes.
Not surprisingly, I am not persuaded by this argument. In fact, it makes me weep and thunder by turns. "Please don't use the expression 'Get the gist'!" I pray, whenever I have to engage in chat-show debate with the latest person advocating the liberating joy of a grammatical free-for-all.
But they always do. "Ah, but does it matter, so long as we get the gist?" they ask, as if saying something original and profound. "Is conveying a gist the highest aim of language?" I ask (sometimes a bit emotionally). "Correct me if I'm wrong, but cavemen pointing and grunting got the bloody gist!"
The other idea gathering force is that the written word is a mere adjunct to speech - which is a rather serious development for those of us who were brought up to worship books, and instinctively regard the hierarchy as the other way round. Yet it's an unignorable fact: when e-mailing and texting, people use a hybrid form of language that is half-talking, half-writing. Hence the decline of punctuation; hence all this annoying "gist" talk; and hence the universal cavalier disregard for spelling.
There is a huge irony here, sadly. Thanks to a miraculous new technology, more people are writing more stuff than ever before. Yet, through a combination of bad education and misguided egalitarianism, the lower the standard of written communication, the better it is perceived to be.
Last weekend, the comedian Bill Cosby sent a very blunt message to the patois-speakers of the black community, to the same effect: "Civil rights campaigners marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads who can't speak English… Everybody knows it's important to speak English… You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."
Doesn't it drive you nuts, all this? The argument goes that the spelling of English words is, by and large, "irrational". Why is there a silent "p" in "receipt" and not in "deceit"? Well, the quick answer is: life's a pain sometimes; stop whining; if you don't like it, go and speak German. In any case, if you try to reform the spelling of English along "rational" lines, you discover quite quickly that there is no way of doing it.
It seems to me that people just resent having to learn things. "How do you explain to an eight-year-old that the word 'yacht' has all these strange letters in it?" a chap once asked me, on the Jeremy Vine Show. This seemed an unanswerable question at the time. It was only afterwards that I worked out my objection to it. Why should the comprehension level of an eight-year-old be our standard for anything?
Personally, I have spelling blind spots, just as I have grammar blind spots - and when they are pointed out to me, I am mortified. That's the way it ought to be, I reckon. On the other hand, however, I am not ashamed at all of thinking that the conventions of the written word (spelling, grammar, punctuation) need to be protected against the barbarians.
Yesterday, as I was travelling by car between Manchester and Leeds, the driver offered to stop at a newsagent's, but as he slowed, I said: "No, look, it says 'stationary' with an A; we'll go somewhere else." He laughed politely, but I wasn't joking.
Perhaps the answer is to carry a stack of Concise OEDs, and deliver them personally, to show shopkeepers that "stationery" has an E. Or, if feelings are running particularly high, tie a Concise OED to a brick and heave it through the window. Either way, one mournfully suspects, they still might not get the gist.
More miserable news about language, then. More reason to pop off to the nearest wall and bang our heads against it. According to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, half the people using it these days are stumped by the difference between "reign" and "rein", and "pouring" and "poring".
However, before we start to share out our cyanide capsules, perhaps we should pause. I, for one, am heartened to hear that people are looking things up in dictionaries at all. Over the past few months, I have been told repeatedly that "everyone" now relies on spell-checker programs, just as they rely on grammar checkers for their punctuation.
Whenever I have pointed out that spell-checkers are inferior to dictionaries because, when you look up a word in a dictionary, you get a definition as well, I have met with pitying looks. Yet evidently - Hooray! - there are still a few people willing to drag that heavy tome off the shelf and discover that "pour" may sound very much like "pore", but is actually a completely different word.
Does it matter that people spell correctly? Well, the pour/pore example is a pretty good place to start, actually. Write, "I have been pouring over my books" and you will find it leads to tricky extra questions, such as, "Pouring what?"
Yet there is an idea steadily gathering force in this country that communication should be judged only by functional effectiveness and that, if you "get the gist" of what someone is saying, this is enough. Notions of "correct" English are for fuddy-duddies who take nasty pleasure in other people's mistakes.
Not surprisingly, I am not persuaded by this argument. In fact, it makes me weep and thunder by turns. "Please don't use the expression 'Get the gist'!" I pray, whenever I have to engage in chat-show debate with the latest person advocating the liberating joy of a grammatical free-for-all.
But they always do. "Ah, but does it matter, so long as we get the gist?" they ask, as if saying something original and profound. "Is conveying a gist the highest aim of language?" I ask (sometimes a bit emotionally). "Correct me if I'm wrong, but cavemen pointing and grunting got the bloody gist!"
The other idea gathering force is that the written word is a mere adjunct to speech - which is a rather serious development for those of us who were brought up to worship books, and instinctively regard the hierarchy as the other way round. Yet it's an unignorable fact: when e-mailing and texting, people use a hybrid form of language that is half-talking, half-writing. Hence the decline of punctuation; hence all this annoying "gist" talk; and hence the universal cavalier disregard for spelling.
There is a huge irony here, sadly. Thanks to a miraculous new technology, more people are writing more stuff than ever before. Yet, through a combination of bad education and misguided egalitarianism, the lower the standard of written communication, the better it is perceived to be.
A lot of nonsense is talked about "proper" English being a means of endorsing the existing social status quo. My feeling is that the opposite is true. If you encourage people to write the way they talk, class divisions are ultimately reinforced, even exacerbated. I'm a working-class girl who read a lot of books and grew up to - well, to write this piece in The Telegraph anyway, so maybe I have an old-fashioned view of education as the instrument of social mobility. But it's pretty clear to anyone that, if children are taught that "getting the gist" is sufficient, everyone stays where they are.
Last weekend, the comedian Bill Cosby sent a very blunt message to the patois-speakers of the black community, to the same effect: "Civil rights campaigners marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads who can't speak English… Everybody knows it's important to speak English… You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."
Doesn't it drive you nuts, all this? The argument goes that the spelling of English words is, by and large, "irrational". Why is there a silent "p" in "receipt" and not in "deceit"? Well, the quick answer is: life's a pain sometimes; stop whining; if you don't like it, go and speak German. In any case, if you try to reform the spelling of English along "rational" lines, you discover quite quickly that there is no way of doing it.
It seems to me that people just resent having to learn things. "How do you explain to an eight-year-old that the word 'yacht' has all these strange letters in it?" a chap once asked me, on the Jeremy Vine Show. This seemed an unanswerable question at the time. It was only afterwards that I worked out my objection to it. Why should the comprehension level of an eight-year-old be our standard for anything?
Personally, I have spelling blind spots, just as I have grammar blind spots - and when they are pointed out to me, I am mortified. That's the way it ought to be, I reckon. On the other hand, however, I am not ashamed at all of thinking that the conventions of the written word (spelling, grammar, punctuation) need to be protected against the barbarians.
Yesterday, as I was travelling by car between Manchester and Leeds, the driver offered to stop at a newsagent's, but as he slowed, I said: "No, look, it says 'stationary' with an A; we'll go somewhere else." He laughed politely, but I wasn't joking.
Perhaps the answer is to carry a stack of Concise OEDs, and deliver them personally, to show shopkeepers that "stationery" has an E. Or, if feelings are running particularly high, tie a Concise OED to a brick and heave it through the window. Either way, one mournfully suspects, they still might not get the gist.
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