If any of you have listened to
Stephen Fry's latest podgram, you may express disgust as I enter into a similarly clichéd rant regarding the nation's school system with regards to the current state of grammar.
An
lot of people of my generation (schooled in the 90s) and younger are utterly terrible at spelling at grammar, and it isn't because of laziness or text messaging or the internet or MTV or cocaine or whatever it is 'young people' do these days.
It is simply because we were
never taught grammar. I have never had an English lesson devoted to grammar. Possibly because most people find it tedious and boring (and this is incompatable with the modern business-style aims-and-target teaching system of course!), and it is something that is best taught through repetition (I have similar fears over the way mathematics is taught). All the way through GCSE, the only time I learnt anything about grammar was in German or French lessons (and I didn't learn much about German or French grammar because I had to learn English grammar in those lessons!). Then, when I did my English Language A-Level, they simply
expected us to know basic grammar and no-one did.
Now I'm one of a tiny minority of people that
loves grammar (or should that be 'love'? I think so.), I'm an absolute stickler for it. I try not to be some arrogant grammar Nazi, but when you've learnt something in grammar you
always notice it even if you don't want to. I
always notice when a supermarket has a '
10 items or less' queue and I know it should be '
10 items or fewer'; it does make me a little angry, not because they've gotten it wrong but because they've made me notice it and made it stand out. It's silly, I know, but if it simply said '
10 items or fewer' I wouldn't notice it and I'd go about my shopping perfectly happy. I have the same grief with '
it's' and '
its', I know how to use an apostrophe and I
always notice when someone uses it wrong and I always will. Maybe it's something wrong with
me, maybe ignorance is indeed bliss, but there's nothing I can do about it.
I understand the merits of linguistic description (rather than prescription) and it's (see!) slightly arrogant to arbitrarily designate what language is 'correct' and what is not, for language is a fluid concept and changes as society changes. Maybe one day "it's" and "its" will be interchangeable, like "who" and "whom" sort of is now (despite a clear grammatical difference).
But I can justify a certain degree of linguistic prescription rationally, for in Physics and Maths all language has
very specific meaning and any degree of ambiguity must be avoided at all costs. One cannot simply rely on context to imply meaning (even the word 'imply' has a specific mathematical meaning), and a clear understanding of grammar is necessary. The difference between 'that' and 'which' is particularly important, as misuse can completely change the meaning of a sentence (and it's something that crops up frequently when describing results and methodology of an experiment).
And yet, most of my fellow Physics students know even
less about language than the general population and many of them I consider to be barely literate. The difficulty they have just in constructing a sentence is worrying, and will inevitably affect the quality of science (many have failed coursework assignments not because of poor science but because of awful spelling and grammar). They will never be able to construct publishable papers.
I end this rant on a despondent note, because I don't know what can be done to rectify this, but I'm certainly worried.
If any of you wish to go through this post with red pen and correct my spelling and grammar, and highlight my hypocrisy, please feel free. I always welcome humility.
My only defense (defence?) is that I am using Google Chrome, whose text editor has a peculiar desire to overwrite text and is responsible for many typos.
