Middlesbrough parents to clamp down on local expressions at home so children can learn 'standard English' Headmistress at Sacred Heart school in Middlesbrough said pupils will suffer in the world of work if they do not learn to adapt their language.
'Only pizzas are delivered': Public sector jargon banned in first style guide for Government announcements - UK Politics - UK. But no more.
Britain’s cadre of real life civil servants have finally been banned from using the jargon that has kept the comedy writers from Yes Minister to the Thick Of It in gags for years. Officials have been issued with an online style guide that tells them, for the first time, what unacceptable Whitehallese is. Worst Words of 2013: Poll. In recent years, TIME has polled the public on an important question: What word or phrase would you like to banish from the vocabularies of everyone, everywhere, until the universe collapses upon itself and all is dust?
After 2011 wrapped up, readers voted to blacklist OMG. As 2012 drew to a close, YOLO topped the list of things people wanted to never hear again. And now, in the final days of 2013, it is again time to air linguistic grievances. Read the curmudgeonly descriptions below and see which one best suits your personal peeves. Midlands primary school bans pupils from using Black Country dialect. Harris Academy in London bans slang. Harris Academy in London has introduced stringent new rules on slangStarting a sentence with 'basically' or ending it 'yeah' also forbiddenLabour MP David Lammy supports the move By Sam Webb Published: 19:47 GMT, 14 October 2013 | Updated: 07:12 GMT, 15 October 2013 An academy in south London has banned popular slang words used by pupils in an effort to improve standards of English.
Apprentice star Luisa Zissman defends apostrophe move. 22 August 2013Last updated at 21:39 ET Luisa Zissman was runner-up in this year's series of The Apprentice Star of the BBC's The Apprentice, Luisa Zissman, has defended her decision to ditch the apostrophe from the name of her new baking accessories business.
Zissman surprised her Twitter followers by asking: "Is it Bakers Toolkit or Baker's Toolkit with an apostrophe? " In the end Zissman, who was runner-up in this year's show, plumped for doing without the punctuation mark because "I like the look of bakers". English words in German: Something borrowed, something new. 2b or not 2b: David Crystal on why texting is good for language. Last year, in a newspaper article headed "I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language", John Humphrys argued that texters are "vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago.
They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped. " As a new variety of language, texting has been condemned as "textese", "slanguage", a "digital virus". According to John Sutherland of University College London, writing in this paper in 2002, it is "bleak, bald, sad shorthand.
GCSE pupils penalised for poor spelling and grammar. Poor spelling and incorrect use of words. The guide to writing gripes advises that gripers should check their spelling before sending it off.
The site articles themselves are generally good and error free. My gripe is about poor spelling and the inadequate use of the English language not only on this site but generally. So many people today have poor spelling skills and use words incorrectly. I am certainly not perfect. Typos happen. Another tangential issue is the incorrect usage of certain words. Is internet English debasing the language? Not IMHO. Apostrophe now: Bad grammar and the people who hate it. 13 May 2013Last updated at 04:58 ET By Tom de Castella BBC News Magazine Children are again to be subject to a rigorous examination in grammar.
But why does it make adults so cross when other adults break the rules? A new grammar and spelling test arrives in primary schools in England this week. Is good grammar still important? Charlie Higson, comedian and author Language is a uniquely human attribute, one of the things that makes us what we are.
We are all born with the faculty to use it and all languages conform to the same basic patterns and structures. The idea that we might need a huge rulebook telling us how to use it properly is ludicrous. People all round the world, and for thousands upon thousands of years, have been using language to communicate perfectly well without needing to be told how to do it by a bunch of grammar Nazis who think that the way they talk and write is the correct, unchanging way. I once met a very interesting guy from the OED who was fed up with people misunderstanding what a dictionary is. Is good grammar still important? Charlie Higson, comedian and author Language is a uniquely human attribute, one of the things that makes us what we are.
We are all born with the faculty to use it and all languages conform to the same basic patterns and structures. The idea that we might need a huge rulebook telling us how to use it properly is ludicrous. Grammar rules everyone should follow. The Idler Academy's inaugural Bad Grammar award was bestowed last week on 100 academics who wrote an open letter to Michael Gove in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum. The letter reads at times as if it was written by committee, but does it really display "the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better"?
Hardly. Like many such gongs, up to and including the Nobel prize for literature, the Bad Grammar award looks suspiciously like the continuation of politics by other means. Is good grammar still important? Text-speak: language evolution or just laziness? Viewpoint: Why do tech neologisms make people angry? The bewildering stream of new words to describe technology and its uses makes many people angry, but there's much to celebrate, writes Tom Chatfield. From agriculture to automobiles to autocorrect, new things have always required new words - and new words have always aroused strong feelings. In the 16th Century, neologisms "smelling too much of the Latin" - as the poet Richard Willes put it - were frowned upon by many. Willes's objects of contempt included portentous, antiques, despicable, obsequious, homicide, destructive and prodigious, all of which he labelled "ink-horn terms" - a word itself now vanished from common usage, meaning an inkwell made out of horn.
Come the 19th Century, the English poet William Barnes was still fighting the "ink-horn" battle against such foreign barbarities as preface and photograph which, he suggested should be rechristened "foreword" and "sun print" in order to achieve proper Englishness. Lucy Mangan: it's not just an apostrophe, it's a catastrophe. The regular reader of this column probably knows what's coming in this week's. He or she would have known what was coming the minute the news broke that Mid Devon district council is poised to ban apostrophes from all its street signs. Some of you will be howling already (I would feel your pain, but I once saw a motorway sign pointing the way to "Hasting's", and once you've been through the fires of misjudged punctuation matters, you can't be burned again.) Others will be rolling their eyes and muttering something along the lines of, "Here we go again.
Why Can’t Johnny Write? Don’t Blame Social Media. Books were my best friends, when I was growing up. I read all the time, but wrote little. It wasn’t until I hit my teens that I began to write regularly for fun. None of it was very good, but I had, thanks to countless hours between book covers, learned a little something about structure, grammar, even spelling. This made me a better-than-average writer for my age and someone who peppered his conversations with big words (mostly because I loved the sound of them). My teenage children read less than I did when I was their age. Despite the generational shift in reading habits, my children are above average writers (although this could be because their parents have writing backgrounds).
Saying no to 'gizit' is plain prejudice - Comment - Voices. Naturally, I support the school's aim of teaching pupils to use written standard English so that they can progress in future education and employment. However, focusing on speech will not improve their writing. Children and language: Taalk propa? Hadaway wi ye. In an attempt to ensure that her pupils don't face disadvantages in later life, the head of a Teesside primary has asked parents to correct children's local accents and grammar.
'Ere, giz us a job? Primary school head bans children from using improper enunciation - Education News - Education. Spelling-on-the-internet. Ralph Fiennes blames Twitter for 'eroding' language. Poor spelling and incorrect use of words. Attitudes. Setting the Tone - TopTenREVIEWS. Language Wars. From the first time we step into an English class, we’re told that the rules matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it’s appropriate to use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these things really matter? Outside of the classroom, what difference does it make if we write “who” instead of “whom” or say “good” instead of “well”?
It does make a difference, at least sometimes. In order to determine when those times are, the question must be asked: For whom are you writing? Take that last sentence, for example. Fascist Workplace Phonics or: How i learned to stop worrying and love phonology Fascism. Armstrong and Miller - Pilot has Lost his Leg. Fascist Workplace Phonics or: How i learned to stop worrying and love phonology Fascism. Anti-Woman Suffrage Pamphlet, 1910. Linguistic prescription. Its aims may be to establish a standard language, to teach what a particular society perceives is correct language, or to advise on effective communication.
If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change. If the usage preferences are radical, prescription may produce neologisms.[3][page needed] Prescriptive approaches to language, concerned with how the prescriptivist recommends language should be used, are often contrasted with the alternative approach of descriptive linguistics, which observes and records how language actually is used.[4] The basis of linguistic research is text (corpus) analysis and field study, both of which are descriptive activities. Description, however, may include researchers' observations of their own language usage. Aims[edit] Descriptivism vs. prescriptivism: War is over (if you want it) « Sentence first. Language is an ever-changing and developing expression of human personality, and does not grow well under rigorous direction. — C.
L. Wrenn, The English Language. Prescriptive - descriptive. Teen slang: What's, like, so wrong with like? 28 September 2010Last updated at 15:50 By Denise Winterman BBC News Magazine Teenage slang - do I not like that? Actress Emma Thompson says young people make themselves sound stupid by speaking slang outside of school. But while the use of the word "like" might annoy her, it fulfils a useful role in everyday speech. "That's, like, so unfair. " One response to Emma Thompson's comments likely to trigger a rush of steam from her ears. The Oscar winner has spoken out against the use of sloppy language.