"I would whip them hard for that."

One of the great joys of reading blogs is not only their intellectual substance but also the fact that, usually, most are so well-written. Tim is no exception. There is so much bad English in our society that, to a grammar-anal person like me, reading something -- anything -- in true Standard Written English is always refreshing, even if I disagree with the content.

So my heart certainly went out to Veda Charrow as I read her op-ed piece in the Washington Times:

Have you ever wondered why so many reporters don't know that "criterion" is singular and "criteria" is plural? How many times have you read something like this in a magazine: "The student who brings a knife to school to peel their orange may be expelled"? How many times have you heard a newscaster saying, "The new phone bill is different than your previous bills"? Or hypercorrections like "The judge admonished the driver whom everyone knew had struck the cat"? In short, have you ever wondered why so many people who should know better make grammatical errors? Earlier in the 20th century, professional writers and educated speakers could be expected to make few, if any, grammatical errors. Newspapers and magazines were edited not only for content and length, but for grammatical correctness. This is no longer the case. Newspapers, magazines, newscasts and, of course, the Internet are rife with errors like the ones above.

I have no doubt that the reason for this profusion of grammatical errors is that most American elementary and high school students aren't taught English grammar anymore. And I'm afraid that my own discipline, linguistics, may be largely to blame.

Read the entire piece, especially if you don't like Noam Chomsky.

As for me, I'm reminded of this Churchill quote:

Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English; and then I would let the clever learn Latin as an honour and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that.

Yeah, yup, whoa, killer, dude, far out, right on...

Indeed. Now if we could just get those Brits to spell "favor" and "honor" correctly...