Brits place blame on emojis for ruining English language

Andy,

I have to disagree with 'some authorities' here. There is no problem with abbreviations that finish with an 's' when the abbreviation is in capitals and the 's' is lower case as it is obviously meant to be a plural. Also if the reader doesn't know if the abbreviation finishes with an 's' or not then it means they don't know the abbreviation and it should be written out in full to give proper understanding (going back to your earlier post about being unambiguous).

I loved the news story a few months back about someone in Bristol who goes round at night deleting (or in a few cases, adding) apostrophes from shop signs to correct their grammar (known generally as the 'Greengrocer's apostrophe' due to the prevalence of greengrocers with signs saying "carrot's", "apple's", etc.

I have the same reaction as you to the sign "Heavy Plant Crossing", but I also remember many years ago reading a book by Terry Pratchett where the heroes (non-human of course) had 'borrowed' a car and having passed a sign saying "Road Works" drove over the unmade section, then complained that the sign was wrong as the road certainly didn't work!

Alasdair

There's a particular error that makes me chuckle everytime I see it and that is the menu in our canteen when we have something like:


"Fish, Chips and Pea's"


I eagerly await to see what the Peas are going to give me but nothing ever arrives!!! 


(Edited because I forgot to add my 'sad face' emoji... )

In one of my previous jobs I wrote and produced the School newsletter and annual magazine which was then checked by the English department and returned to me with many red circles.  Once produced, the staff room copy was then eagerly checked by other teachers and came out with many more red marks.  This was all before emojis, so I don't see these  as being a major issue in language and something else will be along to replace them.

My wife could agree with you at some length on those points! Her particular battle has been to try to persuade her clients that website designers need professional writers / proofreaders as much as any publishing activity does - she very, very rarely succeeds in this. It's an odd thing that printed language is seen as needing checking, while web published language doesn't - it's seen as "IT".

She used to correct the grammar of letters home from our childrens' teachers and return them to them. It's probably just as well that I was a Governor at my childrens' primary school otherwise I hate to think what hideous revenge the teachers would have taken on them for that!


Re "arsenic", when I was working in music technology design we had a very serious memo circulated to say that we were absolutely forbidden from using the abbreviation "anal" for "analogue". I think it's fair to say that the only effect was to encourage those that hadn't already thought of using that abbreviation to start doing so!


Cheers,


Andy

Andy,

Well said. I absolutely agree what we want is unambiguous language, and whether it is deemed 'correct' by the grammar police is a secondary issue. I also have a wife who looks for the correct English (and once when at school to pick up our daughter, got her pen out and put corrections to the grammar on a notice on the board from one of the teachers!), so I feel for you.

The problem with more and more people writing, which you mention, is not the fact that they are doing so but rather the lack of checking. The one job that has declined as the amount of writing has gone up is that of proofreader, once considered essential but now replaced by a computer spellchecker, which unfortunately is not the same thing. A computer would certainly not have stopped the one that I did - a reference to doping material with arsenic where the word 'arsenic' had been split over two lines, and you can guess where the computer put the split!

I think the opportunities for people to self publish now is both a benefit and a drawback, a benefit in that anyone can now get their opinions out for the whole world to read (as we are doing in this forum) but also a drawback in that with so much material published, it is more and more difficult to find the worthwhile publications. As a result those that are not so well written are less likely to reach their target audience.

Regards,

Alasdair

P.S. Just because I like recommending it - for anyone who does need to know the rules of English I can heartily recommend Bill Bryson's wonderful "Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words". We have loads of books on grammar and style in our house but this is by a long way my favourite - it's the only one that actually makes me laugh -  written some years before he became famous. I particularly like his explanation of why sometimes it does just make sense to determinedly split an infinitive. I'm pretty sure it's updated and back in print.

This is something my wife and I often disagree about (after 30 years there has to be something ), as a professional editor she tends to look for "correct" English, I'm rather less worried about it changing. But the thing we do agree about is "unambiguous" English. Apostrophes are a fine (and commonly used) example - used correctly they do ensure ambiguity is removed. It doesn't matter too much if you are putting a price on potatoes, it does when you're writing a safety case!


Which is why I personally like  emojis . As these forums show again and again,brief and rapidly posted writing can be easily misinterpreted - and yes we can (and I sometimes do ) use huge numbers of words to ensure - for example - that a joke  isn't taken as an angry slur . But emojis are SO much quicker!


And what I think is very often forgotten is that - and I think this is a very good thing - in the 21st century more people are writing more then ever before. In engineering as an example, when I started we had technical writers, we had typists, we had a drawing office, the actual engineers didn't actually have to write anything - or if they did it would get "tidied up" before anyone else saw it. In the computer age far more people are "publishing" (for want of a better word) their own words directly. So language is going to change just because of that. Better that most people can write something than writing just being in the hands of a few who understand the arcane (and sometimes randomly invented by the Fowlers for example) rules of English.


I remember a very elderly next-door neighbour saying "in my day everyone left school knowing how to read and write". We tried explaining to him that what he was remembering was a grammar school, which in the 1930s was definitely not typical.


So I feel democratization of language is good, and anything that combats internet flame wars is good, it's just a case of keeping enough knowledge of the useful bits of grammar - not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.


Re any and all "correct English" mistakes in this post - as I say, it's my wife who's the editor, definitely not me


And I was going to be so good and not let these forums distract me today


Cheers,


Andy

Of course when I say 'published' for Beowulf, I actually mean 'written'. It may even have been an oral tradition from earlier, but was would have been written using language generally in use at the time.

Alasdair