The Deterioration Of English Language

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The Continuing Insult to the English Language In which English-speaking country is the English language falling apart fastest? Britain. Are things as bad in Australia? I hope not. In Britain, in 2006, the Labour government is still trying to fix Britain's education system, but surely one of the reasons it's so hard to fix is that most of the people who should know how are themselves the system's victims, and often don't even seem to realize it. They need less confidence. Even when they are ready to admit there might be a problem, few of them realize that they lack the language to describe it. An appropriate sense of desperation has been insufficiently quick to set in. As recently as 2001, one of Britain's higher educational journals carried a letter signed by more than five hundred university professors, lecturers and teachers of English. They all concurred in a single opinion. "The teaching of grammar and spelling is not all that important." But every signatory of that letter must have been well aware that a depressing number of his or her students and pupils would have written the sentence another way: "The teaching of grammar and spelling are not all that important." We can only hope that the number has since decreased. The government would like us to think it has. But the evidence from the media and everyday life suggest that most people would be at a loss to find anything wrong with the first clause of the sentence I am writing now, except, perhaps, the whining irascibility of its tone. Unless taught better, even a quite bright student will not realize that "the evidence" is the subject, and takes the singular. The "and" linking "media" and "everyday life" makes the noun phrase look like a plural, and so, by attraction, the plural verb is put in automatically. People who have learned English as a second language rarely make the error, because they were
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