I began this work many years ago and gave up in frustration

I began this work many years ago and gave up in frustration. But the agony of listening to morons purporting to be English speakers inspired me to start again; this time my invective shall be explicitly interwoven into my denunciation of the sad fact that our English grammar and spelling have collapsed.

Where are the standards that governed the way we speak?

Don’t answer that! It doesn’t matter two pips about the whys and wherefores of whom is to blame. It is simply a fact of life that any idiot with a squeaky voice and a nice hairdo can walk into any radio or television station and get a job as a speaker of English.

This work is not about other languages. It is about English. It is not an attempt to push the grammar cart back to the Fifties. It is a logical attempt to drive home to imbeciles in the media that whatever nonsense they write, say or spit is heard by a modicum of intelligent people who know how to discern whether or not that which is spake is actually what is meant to be spake.

I read a headline in the SMH that told us readers that Australian troops would be ‘bought’ back home. I wrote to the now unworthy newspaper and asked if they implied some form of ‘pay back’ or ‘buy back’. You hear it every day in the media that something is bought rather than brought, as if the ‘r’ is irrelevant as long as the meaning implied is inferred.

Whoa! Step back from that minefield, sergeant! There are many who cannot differentiate between infer and imply and I think we’ll tackle that one later in the book.

Gareth Evans explained patiently to his audience that what was important was what was implied rather than what was said. That explanation was apt as far as the media were concerned. For decades the media have scorned pedantry and have gone the way of the progressives of the seventies, ignoring grammar and spelling as anachronisms of a dinosaur age.

I wish not to seek explanations for this behaviour. Suffice it is that I express my derision for those persons upon whom, somehow, the onus for our language has been entrusted.

I once called myself the Apostle of Apostrophe as I retaliated against the upsurge in miss-placed apostrophes. There they were, everywhere! None could write a plural without its becoming possessive, as if six boys could possibly become six boy’s.

My original title for the copious amount of venom I wrote about stupid pronunciation and arrogant mis-use of syntax was ‘In Arresting Leah Nuff’. I chose this title after an agonising hour or so of listening to Michael Lynagh commentating on a particular game of Rugby. Eventually I turned off the sound and watched the game with the radio blaring from another room.

Talking of sporting commentators is a bit of a paradox since we have no idea of whether they’re sporting or not. These sport commentators bring to the ears a marvellous concoction of sounds. I can imagine them sometimes, away from the game, in a situation far from sport, and their idiosyncrasies persistent in their speech as they conduct their persuasive gambits with their partners, business colleagues, or people they confront during their daily excursions through life. How do their friends handle the speech patterns? Does Jana Wendt pause after each prepositional ‘to’ while speaking to her children?

Speaking of the word ‘to’ … what a mess Australians have made of this little preposition. Formerly known as the directional preposition because it let the sentence have direction, a form of space that carried from one position to another, a vectorial impulse that connected the speaker to the listener, the word ‘to’ was not the most important in the sentence. The word ‘to’ merely conveyed a sense of direction between the subject and the object, as in ‘the boy went to the shop’. In this sentence the two nouns have relevance because of the verb ‘went’; the preposition ‘to’ is almost superfluous as the sentence really means ‘boy went shop’.

So why do we emphasise the least important word in the sentence? Because the speech people demanded that their pupils eradicate the ‘um’ factor from their speech and the way to do this was to emphasise the prepositions and the articles such as ‘a’ and ‘the’. In this way the articles assumed such prolonged emphasis that the simple ‘uh’ sound turned into the turgid ‘ay’ sound. A plate of cheese suddenly became ‘ay plate of cheese’.

But even this anomaly couldn’t get off the ground without the ums and ahs that it was supposed to eradicate. We began to watch Australians gum out awful sounds such as ‘ay uh’ and ‘ay um’ and the extremely vile ‘ayah’, as in ‘ there was aya …pause…goat in the paddock.

Oaklahoma Ch 9 news 6Mar04

Trialling a new test… ABC News Sophie Scott 10 Mar 04