This is the first of something I hope to make a regular thing. I get annoyed quite often when I see any language being abused, and so being the pedantic bastard that I am, I have decided to begin taking some back. It positively wounds me when I see the repeat offences against language that occur in internet land, and there are two major reasons for this-

1. If not already, then soon young Anglophones will receive most of their reading material from internet sources
2. It appears that the internet is already an extremely important teaching aid for non-native speakers of English

 

Because of this, is it not vitally important that people learn to use written English correctly, not just well enough to be more-or-less understood, but to gain actual grammatical and syntactical fluency, to be able to sort correct usage from the incorrect and in general, to be able to use the richness of the English language to it’s fullest?

 

Why am I focusing on the English language you ask? Why not Spanish, French, German, why not just language in general? I have two reasons for this-

1. Ability- I do not presume to have the necessary ability in any other language to begin preaching to others as to how they should use their own mother tongues.
2. Urgency- other languages, have central bodies which set standards for usage and thus give both the academic and the language student something to aim for, they attempt  to preserve what they can of the vitality of their languages and signal words which have been borrowed from other languages, or which are corruptions of accepted words or usages. To the best of my knowledge, there are no such institutions in English-speaking countries, dictionaries set standards eg. OED but they are not as recognised and as international as for example the Real Academia Española which aims to preserve Spanish- mostly from the invasion of English words.

 

In the interest of clarity and the propagation of understanding in the mass-diffusion of written documents, should there not be editors for the internet, as there are in newspapers, and I mean editors whose only function is to make the intentions of the writer clear, not to place their own words before those of the person whose name will be signed on the page. Small changes may become big changes over time- so small inaccuracies may become glaring with time. If I am not simply a crank and a pedant, then perhaps I may help some people to improve their language-usage.

 

This project is the result of my having trawled through countless websites and forums as such my aim is to flag the repeat offenders rather than simple misspellings and grammatical errors due to carelessness, everyone makes mistakes, I cannot and would not attempt to cure that, however ignorance is eminently curable- that is the reason why I am bothering to write this, and so without further ado, onto the first installment of the (sic) Bay.

 

Amatuer-

Every time I read this orthography, it causes my gall to rise, the word is not pronounced ‘ama-chewer’, it is spelt and pronounced AMATEUR. It is so amateurish, when someone gets this wrong, it looks incorrect, it feels incorrect, it just is incorrect- why do people get it wrong? They pronounce it incorrectly- here’s my tip, learn a bit of French and pay attention to pronunciation, you’ll never get this word wrong again.

 

Grammer-

No we’re not talking about Kelsey Grammer the famous over-actor, we’re talking about the word which should be spelt GRAMMAR, and comes from the ancient Greek ‘grammatikos’ meaning ‘concerning letters’ via the Latin ‘grammatica’ and the Old French ‘gramaire’. When in lower case ‘grammer’ is not a word, it’s that simple, it is not a second accepted rendering, it is simply incorrect. So please watch your grammar and not your grammer.