THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH (PART TWO)

In part one of this article I said that if we at QES are to be at the forefront in the battle to improve standards of English we must first say what an acceptable standard is. For a start, it is clear to me that in the 21st century there can be no place for pedantry. Popular usage has always shaped the English language even though the grammarians of the past 400 years or so made numerous attempts to standardise it by laying down formal rules. This was like trying to catch the wind or to kiss a girl who is leaning backwards. Usage will always have the last say and that is the way it should be.

The trouble with this is that, with the ever-increasing dumbing down of standards since the 1960s, popular usage could easily debase the language beyond recognition in no time at all. On the other hand, grammatical dogmatism has left us in a kind of no-man's land between right and wrong. Half of us can argue that certain usages are wrong because the grammar books said so, and the other half can say that they are right because the best writers frequently use them. This 'no-man's land' is certainly an obstacle which must be overcome before any attempt is made to determine what an acceptable standard of English is.

There are probably about a dozen or so areas of difficulty in English that fall into this right-wrong category. We must decide which ones are wrong, and therefore to be 'outlawed', and which ones should be allowed to go forward as acceptable English. The 'We' at the beginning of my previous sentence needs more detail, which I will give in the next part of this article. I will also select three or four of the right-wrong usages referred to above and, to set the ball rolling so to speak, will give my personal view on each one.

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH

This is the opening sentence in the preface of a book on English grammar:

"It is a lamentable fact, deplored by examiners and teachers alike, that amongst secondary school students there is too much slipshod reading whereby vague impressions only of an author's meaning are acquired."

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you would like to have a guess at the year in which this book was published. 1990? 1980? 1960? Bad luck, it was published over 70 years ago in 1934.

Ah! nothing has changed then, I hear you say. Well not quite. I give below two of the nine questions that made up the English paper in the 1922 examination for admission to King Edward's High School in Birmingham:

1. 1. Name the Parts of Speech. Give a definition of each, and also
   compose simple sentences to illustrate each Part of Speech.


2. 2. Give an example of (a) a transitive verb with a double object (b) a
   gerund governing an object (c) a subordinate conjunction introducing a
   conditional clause.

If we bear in mind that these questions were for children at age 11, it is obvious that if standards had fallen in the 12 years from 1922 to 1934 they must have fallen from a very high level indeed. Michael Robinson's excellent articles in Quest (100 and 101) show that standards in English had not in fact fallen significantly by the 1950s but had rapidly deteriorated after 1965 with the abolition of most of the grammar schools.

Who is responsible? If we criticise the teachers, we are blaming the messengers but not the senders of the messages. No, it is the educational establishment that must take full responsibility. By the way, it is interesting to note that the exam question 1. above contains a tautology ("and also") and a minor ambiguity. No doubt the children knew what the examiners required.

We must not be fooled into thinking that the university students who are chosen to appear on "University Challenge" are representative of all university students. Dr Bernard Lamb's articles in Quest and other places clearly show that they are not.

If we at The Queen's English Society are to be at the forefront in the battle to improve standards of English, we must first say in some detail what an acceptable standard is. How do we do this?

Watch this space.