Spelling 101

Now I get to exercise the image-friendly nature of this blog technology. Today's lesson is about spelling. Everyone makes mistakes. Yes, even me. Being a journalist by trade, it's annoying when I discover my own spelling mistakes and I can only imagine that anyone who works in the media or in teaching has the same level of anxiety about spelling and grammar.

While I have my moments of typo-mania, there are some people who should be extra extra extra careful, such as signwriters. On the right is an example I saw today, poached from the Hoyts website advertising travel deals for Student Flights. Now, I don't know where in Australia Kadaku is but it looks like a good deal to me... This follows hot on the heels of yesterday's Daily Telegraph sub-heading about "Reece Witherspoon" (sic) who won the Best Actress Oscar. Strangely the rest of the article spelt her name correctly (Reese) so it was just the person who did the sub-heading who lacked the popular knowledge required of someone who works in a large media organisation like News Ltd.

Once upon a time I wanted to roam the streets of Sydney armed with a black marker, correcting the spelling and grammar of the city's worst offenders. Popular misspellings are fairly common words like 'calender' instead of 'calendar', 'stationary' instead of 'stationery' (the former means 'not moving' the latter represents pens and paper supplies etc). Then there's a raft of apostrophes that just shouldn't exist, like 'mango's'. The plural of 'mango' is 'mangoes'. Apostrophes should only be used to express possession e.g. 'Dr Witmol's Blog' or instead of a missing letter like contractions such as 'isn't' (is not) or 'o'clock' (of [the] clock).

We often laugh at weird phrasing that has been translated from another language into English (I wish I'd had my black marker for some of the menus I saw overseas) but when an English speaking country can't even understand basic spelling and grammar rules, we can hardly point the finger. It isn't like I'm trying to stop split infinitives from taking over the world - I just want people to know how to spell basic words (and if in doubt, consult someone who knows!) and know how to use an apostrophe. Learning the difference between 'your' and 'you're', 'to', 'too' and 'two' would be nice as well.

I could blame the proliferation of SMS and the internet for this dearth in spelling/grammar but the sad fact is that we need to grasp the initial concept before we can use and abuse it. Personally, I was never taught grammar at school and I believe this is a dying art due to bureaucracy and people putting it in the 'too hard' basket. What has happened is there are now teachers who don't know anything about grammar, teaching in a system that is slowly falling apart in the literacy stakes. Anecdotally I heard that some children in high school can't even indentify a noun in a sentence. In fact, I would say that children in non-English speaking countries get a better grammar education. Ironically, I learnt more about English grammar from French class than English (which I enjoyed but was geared towards analysing text). Perhaps this is why it seems more difficult for English speakers to pick up other languages; lack of their own (convoluted) grammar makes it harder to understand the concept of other languages' grammar.

Why is spelling and grammar so important? Simply, verbal communication represents meaning; spelling and grammar are like the laws of that meaning that can be manipulated according to the user's whim. When you misspell words or say something in a grammatically incorrect manner, it doesn't mean that you'll never be understood but rather that there is a greater possibility of being misunderstood. You'll give off a better impression and represent yourself and your views in a better light the clearer you communicate. How many times have you sent an email only to realise, after a terse reply, that what you wrote was ambiguous and taken wrongly by the recipient?

Which brings me to playing with language. I have no problem with people playing with language, be it pun-filled headlines, advertising or a witty joke. (Or not a witty joke like this one I made up that fails because it doesn't have a punchline or any real context - "Toilet bowls and W.C. Fields"). But what has to happen first is the establishment of an educated population who will be able to distinguish chartered language from played-with language. That way we can ask those pesky professions using jargon to undo us (law and politics are two that spring to mind) to speak in plain English and actually understand what they mean.