Your abusing are language

Today I want to vent my frustration at some of the careless grammatical mistakes that seem to be becoming increasingly prevalent in written communication and are gradually mangling the beautiful English language into something incomprehensible, yet when the offenders are challenged they fail to even understand what they've done wrong. While I have no formal language qualifications beyond a GCSE in English and I'm not immune from getting things wrong, I do feel I have an above average grasp of my native tongue (which I hope is apparent in my writings on this blog) so what to me are such basic mistakes really do annoy me as it should be very easy to get these right. Don't get me wrong, I would never have a go at anyone who has a genuine communication difficulty such as dyslexia or similar, and I'm talking about what should be basic fundamentals of grammar learned at primary school.

Consider the following sentence: "Your write, we except Paypal has payment for are products". There are so many things wrong with that, yet it is made up entirely of valid English words and to a growing number of people appears to be a perfectly coherent sentence as they don't know any better.

Your and you're

This one has been around for a very long time in casual conversation, but has now started creeping into supposedly professional publications, one memorable example being a greeting card I received with the exclamation "Your a star" in large letters. That must have been through a design and production process that cost a substantial sum of money and involved many people, yet at no point did anyone question the wording. Do they not care or do they simply not know any better? I have even seen "you'r", which is neither one thing nor the other and isn't even a real word - perhaps this hybrid is a form of bet-hedging by people who don't know which one to use.

As and has

This seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon that I have only seen in the last couple of years. The use of 'has' in place of 'as' or vice versa is difficult to understand as the former is a longer word that is pronounced differently and has (or 'as') a completely different meaning. I wonder if it is perhaps related to certain regional accents that don't pronounce the letter 'H' in spoken dialogue, resulting in phrases such as "going 'ome to my 'ouse", and by extension 'as' is presumed to have ('ave?) a silent 'H' when written.   

Our and are

Another strange and recent one concerning two words that should be pronounced differently, yet often aren't (or perhaps that should be "ourn't"?!). As an example, I once saw an advert for an event inexplicably "featuring are own DJs", yet oddly no one ever seems to do the opposite and use 'our' when they mean 'are'.
 

Accept and except

Muddling up these two can give a sentence a completely different meaning so it is a particularly unforgiveable but worryingly common error. For instance, consider the payment instruction "Paypal only excepted". That actually means you will take any form of payment other than Paypal, which is the exact opposite of what is really desired and should be expressed as "Paypal only accepted". When I see such a statement, I always have to resist the temptation to take it literally and ask the seller what payment methods they will accept if Paypal is excepted, as they probably wouldn't understand the question.

Write and right

This one is a little less common but still turns up more regularly than it should, when people say things like "I'll right it down". There isn't much else to say about this, but should such people have the right to write?


So what is causing this decline in standards of communication? Once again I must place some blame on the computer as the ubiquity of spelling and grammar checkers and predictive text perhaps means people no longer feel the need to think about what they write and just let the computer decide what is right or wrong. The trouble is, despite what some people may think, computerised grammar checking is fraught with difficulty and spelling checkers are not perfect: they will not see anything wrong with my example sentence as every word is valid and spelled correctly, yet some are not the correct words for this context, which is not easy for a computer to understand. So often I see completely incomprehensible text that was obviously written by someone who simply accepted (not excepted!) what their device suggested without even checking if it made sense.

I do think standards of education have declined in recent years as well and there is less emphasis on the fundamentals of spelling and grammar, which are somehow seen as not important - as long as you can make yourself understood, that's good enough even if the grammar is wrong. It makes me despair to see children being taught a foreign language at primary school before they have even fully grasped their mother tongue. The strange thing is, here at the university I have friends from all over the world for whom English is not their native language, some of whom are from countries that don't even use the Latin alphabet, yet they speak and write English better than many natives. I can only conclude from this that teaching of English as a foreign language is more thorough than the teaching of it as the native language, which is a pretty sad reflection on society.

I know there are people who will argue none of this really matters, and as long as you can make yourself understood then who really cares. I guess my desire to get it right stems from my background as a computer programmer, where languages have very strictly defined rules of spelling and grammar and using the wrong word will often result in the computer completely failing to understand your program and refusing to run it, so I treat the English language the same way. I really would like to see more people taking pride in the language and checking what they write more carefully, as sometimes using the wrong word will give what you intended to say a completely different meaning, and this careless practice does nothing to aid comprehension. Isn't the whole point of a language to make yourself understood to others?