What The Butler Saw

As I sit here listening to Kylie Minogue's Turn it into Love after another day of pitching, chasing, research, etc, my thoughts inevitably turn to something that has been weighing heavily on my mind for several years now and seems to irritate me more every day.

Bad grammar.

It's absolutely EVERYWHERE. We all know about greengrocers' apostrophe issues, but recently I've been reading cringe-inducing bloopers in national 'broadsheet' papers and in massive advertising campaigns from FTSE-100 companies you'd have thought would get someone to proofread their copy before spending millions disseminating the bloody stuff.

And when I say cringe-inducing, I'm only too aware that it's me cringing, not the people who've written and published the errors. I suspect in most cases they have no idea what educated people think of their mistakes and how counter-productive this is. There is a tiny army of us who will boycott buying anything from companies who can't tell where an apostrophe should go.

But how can an advertisement with a heart-stopping, critical grammar malfunction still be running if the advertisers know about it? I can only assume that no-one has told them; and if this is the case, it must be because hardly anyone has the education to notice. Similarly, the plonkers writing the bad copy are so ubiquitous that one can only deduce that there is now a whole multi-generational society of people under 30 who neither know nor care what a comma is, let alone the subjunctive.

I'm trying very hard here not to name any names, but some of the kind of mistakes I've read recently in the highest levels of the mainstream media include:

- Palate for palette ('The painter's rich palate of hues')

- 'This lovely contemporary house' (Contemporary of what - 1500? Contemporary does not mean modern!)

- 'Celeb hairdresser XX does wonderful girl's haircuts' (How difficult is it to distinguish between singular and plural exactly?)

-'It didn't phase me' (Hello, faze as opposed to phase, anyone? Anyone?)

-'The tiger was grinning, it's teeth beared.' (Two shockers here...)

'The tiger bared its teeth, the tiger then started moving towards me.' (Ever heard of semi-colons or full-stops? Why do so many people insist on starting sentences after commas?)

I know from personal experience that a lot of people my age (27) were never taught any grammar at school. My education was unusual in that (a) growing up, I read classic books by great writers with dedication and out of choice, (b) I was taught English, Latin, French and Spanish grammar at a school where you were considered a failure if you didn't get an A star at GCSE, and (c) I loved words and delighted in learning new ones.

But the real reason people no longer seem to know basic vocab and grammar must be because they do not read and rarely have. Whether or not you are taught Latin and English grammar and all that at school, so long as you read good books and are reasonably bright, you pick up words and how to use them.

This is what comes of a dumbed-down culture where schoolchildren no longer have to read pre-20th century texts. Instead, they watch the DVD or, more likely, simply get taught a totally 'easy', undemanding novel written in the last 10 years. Anything to let them off the terrible expectation that they could be capable of grasping 'big words' and 'complicated grammar rules'.

I despair over this - I truly do.