War Of Words

If you see me parading around my bedroom wearing an elaborately over sized pair of mirrored aviators, smoking a huge cigar and bedecked in camouflaged underwear, please don't be alarmed. This is merely my get-up for a new and noble campaign.

I hereby declare war on poor spelling, grammar and pronunciation. Such a triumvirate of enemies may seem insurmountable at a time when our brave, barrel-chested, lion-hearted armed forces are stretched to breaking point around the world. But I believe this is a just war, and a necessary one, especially considering how easy it is to win.

My opening skirmish is aimed at pronunciation. Pronunciation changes: from "Oh aye" in the North to "Ooh arr" in the South, people say things differently. Dialects are not just existent, they are desirable; their ingenuity perfectly exemplifies the malleability and adaptability of the Queen's English.

However, there are people out there who pronounce things wrongly, and I don't just mean the names of French wines on a Menu.

A friend of mine, who's surname is often party to a bit of mispronunciation, says 'Ya' instead of 'Yeah'. I know that 'yeah' is not a grammatically correct way of indicating the affirmative, but this little discrepancy, for me, may as well be a CIA torture technique. It makes him sound pretentious, something which he genuinely isn't. Whenever he does it - solely for the purpose of annoying me, I'm sure - I feel like punching him in the Adam's apple, before inviting him to repeat what he just said as he fights for his last wheezing breath.
My war's first operation could be some sort of real-time pronunciation penalisation system, wherein anybody who pronounces a word like a deaf Northern Irishman with a lisp is fined on the spot. Gordon Brown would be the first to empty his Murray Mint wrapper-lined pockets.

That man is impossibly bad at pronouncing words. During the last PMQs session, he insisted on pronouncing 'al Qaida' (or al Qaeda), 'al Keyada'. My reconnaissance suggests he does it deliberately; he not-so-subtly avoids sound bytes of him broaching salient topics by making up words, so he cannot be quoted as decisive. "Och nae," he could respond, "I said I didn't actually care about the 'poower', not the poor."

To add to Brown's idiosyncratic artillery, we have his pronunciations of 'Bournemouth' as 'Born Mouth', 'The Liberal Democrats' as 'The Lib'ral Partee', and 'Burma' as 'Mee-AN-mar'. At least Thatcher could still speak her way around that plum in her throat.

Next on the invasion and Clintonesque 'annihilation' list comes grammar. Poor grammar is extolled all around us. Round the corner is a greasy-spoon called 'Macs Cafe'. Who's? Assuming that it is, in fact, the property of Mac, (which I happen to know it is: he's Italian and can't be making a penny, but money laundering allegations will hardly reduce the price of my already-discounted bacon sandwiches) then surely an apostrophe should feature somewhere?

Rudimentary espionage work also points to a sign at Hammersmith Underground Station that reads: "Caution walk, don't run". That's not a sentence. The correlative link between two motional infinitives doesn't exist with the precursive 'caution', and so should not be clausally linked. It's an instruction, not an exercise in hypertaxis.
Misused apostrophes are the WMDs of the conflict - and they are spreading like anthrax. It seems that even Britain's greatest minds cannot get it right.

Finally, the battle over superfluity. People, myself included, say phrases laced with superfluity all the time. Example: is it necessary to say "any time soon," given that all it really means is "soon"? The 'any time' is as redundant as a Northern Rock Cashier.
As Charlie Sheen taught us in Hotshots, war can be funny. Similarly, the misuse of language need not always result in exasperation, as Lee and Herring masterfully demonstrate above.

During the long, dark nights of our final year at University, my roommate and I would eagerly anticipate the comic relief the latest issue of TCS would afford us - not for its woefully inane investigative journalism, but for Sarah Hope's column. She was a theatre 'critic', who simply could not speak English. I don't mean that in a Enoch Powell sense - she was English - but she still, at the age of 19, hadn't mastered even the rudiments of our language. Her mistakes were so numerous and her sentences so tautological that we would both end up in cramping fits of laughter, still in the dark as to what play she apparently sat through.

Her worst crime - one that made Slobodan Milosevic look like a Christian Aid worker - was her latent misuse of the word "literally". As in, "You could literally hear a pin drop," or "The audience literally exploded with laughter." The audience didn't explode. If they had, they may have created a a slightly more newsworthy article. They may have figuratively or metaphorically exploded, but not "literally". That's just silly.
There is no need for the word 'literally' to exist. You are either talking figuratively, - in which case its usage would be erroneous - or you are talking on the simple level of reality - in which case you don't need to say it at all; it's implied that you are talking on a literal level of occurrence, or else we'd all have to clarify after every sentence or observation that we weren't referring to a dream we had.

This might not be a grammar issue at all, but it is one which grates on me like a new pair of sandals.
As I put my feet up on my oak-panelled desk (before realising it's in fact a very uncomfortable way to sit) and sipped a victorious single-malt, reflecting on an effective campaign, I read an article drenched in liquid irony about the correct usage of the much marginalised semicolon.

Bombarding a writer for succumbing to the kind of carelessness he is vilifying isn't a productive route to take (I refer the reader to the several mistakes they will doubtless spot during the course of this post). Sgt Sam Roberts tried to act as a bastion of pedantry and meticulousness, barricading himself against lazy writing and signing. The fact that ended up being killed in a friendly fire incident is by the by.

I shall return to England, not doubt to public antipathy on the grounds that no-one voted for the war, and pin a medal made out of a busted Blue Peter badge upon my gushingly proud lapel. There are no winners in war but, if I have managed to make just one person get their hyphens in the right gaps, I'll consider myself a victor.