We all know that correct English is no longer taught in most of our schools, but now at last the government seems to agree.
A few weeks ago it announced the introduction of new A-level grades to make it more difficult to achieve the highest ranking. From next year pupils will have to gain 80 per cent to be awarded an A-grade A-level and 90 per cent if they are to earn an A* — and they will not be allowed to sit the exam again to achieve a higher mark.A damning research programme has just found that there are fewer school-leavers in work or training now than there were when Tony Blair entered Downing Street ten years ago. An alarming 206,000 16-to-18-year-olds are classified as NEETs — not in education, employment or training — and employers are finding increasingly that even some university graduates are barely semi-literate. No wonder the proper use of English is declining so rapidly.Nobody under the age of 40, for instance, even in middle-class families, would dream nowadays of saying ‘my friend and I went down to the pub’: now it’s ‘me and my friend’ or ‘her and myself gone dahn a boozer’.
Nobody under the age of 40 ever uses the words ‘said’ or ‘says’ any more: it’s always ‘go’, ‘is’ or ‘went’: ‘So ’im and me goes dahn a boozer an’ ’e’s like, “Hey, man, check the babe in the corner!” an’ I go, “**** me! I’m in love,” an’ ’e went, “Hands off, man, I saw her first” so I’m like, “Too bad, man, she’s mine.”’Carelessness about our beautiful language is sprouting everywhere, even among the allegedly intelligent. Sheer ignorance, for instance, has changed the word ‘disinterested’, which means neutral or unbiased but is now widely used to mean ‘uninterested’. ‘Decimated’ means ‘reduced by one tenth’ but is now used constantly to mean ‘obliterated’. Originally ‘prestigious’ meant dodgy or deceitful but most people nowadays seem to think that it means ‘full of prestige’.Such irritations, however, are insignificant by comparison with some truly dreadful modern horrors: the nouns (like gift) that are now being used as verbs; the ‘must-have’ gadgets; the BBC Wimbledon commentator who remarked that the challenge faced by one player ‘was a tough ask’ but another was ‘do-able’.A couple of days later BBC News 24’s chief political correspondent, James Landale, reported that the job of the new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, was also ‘a big ask’, and Sky TV’s cricket commentator Nasser Hussein, a graduate of Durham University, remarked that the West Indian batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul had just played his side’s ‘stand-out innings’ — and he said it again, twice, a few days later [1 July]. He meant ‘outstanding’.What is truly depressing about this decline in the use of the language is that it has now spread even to the very people who should be upholding and defending it: professional authors, writers, journalists and broadcasters.
On 27 May, I’m sorry to say, even the Spectator’s Rod Liddle, a master of English, reported in his Sunday Times column that John Prescott’s farewell tour of America and the Caribbean was paid for ‘by you and I’ instead of ‘by you and me’.On the same day in the Sunday Telegraph John Preston wrote in an interview with Charles Webb, the author of The Graduate: ‘He has no interest in money, and nor would he get any if Home School is made into a film.’ Why and nor?In another issue of the Sunday Times the Emeritus Professor of Family Planning at University College London, John Guillebaud, remarked that ‘the greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.’ No, no, professor: it’s ‘one child fewer’.Even last week’s Reform report which revealed that ‘less than half of children achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C’ should of course have referred to fewer than half, not less, but that’s how rotten the misuse of English has now become.
Dumbing down has become so widespread that nowadays newspapers keep hyphenating words unnecessarily so that couples no longer split up: they split-up, break-up or walk-out. Whatever next? Wake-up? Sit-up? Throw-up?But of all the strange new linguistic-monstrosities that are increasingly-inflicted on us, perhaps the most-inexplicable is the plague of perplexing prepositions.For years even people who ought to know better have been saying that they are ‘bored of’ something rather than ‘bored by’ or ‘bored with’ it. Last month Peter Mandelson, an Oxford graduate, was telling the press that he had become ‘bored of the gym’ and had now taken up yoga.But now most of the other prepositions are also suddenly and inexplicably being misused by journalists. During the World Cup cricket tournament in the West Indies in March almost every newspaper, TV and radio sports reporter decided for no apparent reason that teams were being defeated ‘to’ each other rather than by each other. They kept referring to Pakistan’s defeat ‘to’ Ireland, South Africa’s defeat ‘to’ Australia, England’s defeat ‘to’ New Zealand.
Before long this idiocy had infected every other sport, so that football and rugby teams and tennis players were suddenly being defeated ‘to’ their opponents. On 3 June the Sunday Telegraph’s Mandrake editor, Tim Walker, even mentioned that Andrew Davies was writing the screenplay ‘to’ the new film version of Brideshead Revisited and that Sir John Mortimer had once written the screenplay ‘to’ the classic television version. Their screenplays were surely not ‘to’ but ‘for’ or ‘of’ the film and TV versions.Why did this illogical misuse suddenly become so common, and why has it equally suddenly been followed by a rash of other inappropriate prepositions?A month ago the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, a Cambridge graduate, announced that ‘the balance of risks to inflation remains to the upside’. To the upside? On the upside, maybe, or perhaps towards the upside — if he really had to use such a clumsy phrase.Earlier this month there was a newspaper advertisement for the Möben fitted kitchen company that read ‘be amazed with over 30 beautiful kitchen styles’ when it should have read ‘be amazed by’ more than 30 styles.
In May the Daily Telegraph reported that Napoleon Bonaparte’s bedroom ceiling in Elba was ‘entirely covered in his personal symbol of the bee’. Covered in? Covered by or with, surely. Weirdest of all was this item about Lord Black’s trial in Chicago that appeared not just once but twice on the Times’s website on 18 June: ‘...if he is found to have wilfully blinded himself from a crime’.Blinded himself from a crime? Blinded himself to a crime, I think. If even the Times — which used to boast of being ‘The Top People’s Paper’ — has sunk so low it’s perhaps less surprising that so many young people today are barely literate.There is, however, one consolation: the increasing arrival in Britain of hundreds of young immigrants from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia who all seem to speak our language much better than we do. They may yet help to rescue English from the English.