Words and Music

In ranting against the current ignorance and ineptitude displayed by people who should know better – i.e. those who earn a living from the use of words – where does one start? The misuse of apostrophes has been covered comprehensively by Lynne Truss in “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, but the popularity of this admirable book doesn’t seem to have led to any improvement.

It’s often hard to see any logic behind the insertion of unnecessary apostrophes. Some people are apparently uneasy about the plurals of words ending in a vowel (other than ‘e’), for example “cameras”, “zebras”, “pianos” and of course “tomatoes”.

One can sympathize with this to some extent, because such plurals sometimes look odd and there’s often some doubt about whether to insert an ‘e’ before the ’s’; but there’s a very simple rule concerning apostrophes: PLURALS NEVER HAVE AN APOSTROPHE (unless of course you’re talking about something that belongs to the plural object in question, like “the pianos’ keyboards” meaning the keyboards of more than one piano).

With a rule as simple as that, how do so many people get it wrong? Is it some form of mild dyslexia that affects a large percentage of the population? In my mailbox this morning I received a newsletter from the booking manager of a swing band which contained the following: “The gigs in both Los Angeles & Washington DC had a highest ever attendance, with over 850 dancers braving the sub-zero temperature’s … “.

What on earth possessed him to put in that rogue apostrophe? “Temperature” is just a normal word; it’s not an abbreviation, it’s not foreign, it doesn’t end in an ‘a’ or an ‘o’ – how can anyone with a claim to being even moderately literate write “temperature’s”? If he were my booking manager I’d sack him.

A note from the Department Of Stating The Bleedin’ Obvious (aka the West Oxfordshire District Council): Among things you CANNOT put in your recycling box is “Anything too large to fit in the box.”

… and I do mean English. As she used to be spoke by reasonably well-educated English people. I’m an old fogey. I’m a grumpy old man. I’m just old.

In my 68 years I’ve seen and heard many changes in the way English is written and spoken. Not all of them are bad. A living language must and does change. However, some of the changes are – in my grumpy old-fogeyish view – regrettable, to say the least.

In this blog (note that I eagerly embrace neologisms such as ‘blog’, a new word to describe a new concept) I shall mostly be charting what I see as the decline of the language, as evidenced by its misuse in newspapers, television, radio and the Web. (Note also that I say ‘radio’, not ‘wireless’ – I’m not that much of an old fogey.)

I don’t quite know where this blog will take me; how it will develop and mutate. I know that the tide of change, most of it for the worse, can’t be stemmed or turned back; but at least I can raise a still small voice of protest amid the prevailing cacophony.

The blog’s title, by the way, is from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson: “Bright is the ring of words, when the right man rings them.”