Calling pedants, teachers, wordsmiths and class warriors.

Xenia - I think you a being a bit contradictory.

Human physical beauty is a huge natural advantage, but it is entirely dependent upon life's genetic lottery. Why should it be taboo in families to acknowledge that one child is particularly good looking? The knowledge will be circulating in the collective family subconscious in any case, where it is a lot more dangerous.

Interesting topic. My mother teaching 40 children per class in very rough state Catholic schools after the war sought to teach them correct grammar - so no "for free" or rather than "free", prepositions correct etc etc Why would one want to change the grammar or even accent of pupils or our children? Simply because it can help them get jobs. It is not just exam results which matter when you're being assessed and indeed speaking to clients and customers. Obviously it depends on what you plan to do and for many jobs it matters not a jot.

We have had years of interesting debate with the children over words, grammar, accent, class. I remember the days of my under 5s saying "you was" because their nanny did but that changes once they get to school unless you send them to a school where the teachers say "you was".

Then was the teenage phase with that awful rising inflection at the end of sentences like a question but that seems to have died as death as did the even worse "like" every other word in sentences.

Now the 8 year olds who do loads of grammar at school and are quite good are learning MSN speak and take huge pleasure in laughing at my writing "you" when they know the rule is to write "u" if you're on-line (in their world, not mine - I cast men into oblivion if they type "u").

"Why do children feel they have to hide their intellect or else get picked on?" - on that topic they don't if you send them to the right school. One reason some of us who are able, pay.

Beauty... ah yes Labour can dumb down children into one size fits all comprehensiveness and let the brains of the child stultify but they can't take away beauty. We are all born with these natural advantages or disadvantages. I never realised when I was growing up as my mother was wise enough not to mention it, that they thought I was better looking than the others but my sister who only just told me, for her it was a big thing. Why did she think it mattered our bone structures differed? I suppose because all you musmnetters are more likely to buy a woman's magazine with a beautiful woman on the front cover rather than an ugly one. So we have this interesting situatino where most people won't admit they prefer beauty but their behaviour shows that they do. So in effect many people are liars on this issue.

From a Russell Group university, no less!

If that is the case, then how are these students about to graduate with an upper second class degree?

I'm a lot more bothered by the sentiments and level of articulacy the two statements reveal than the vernacular.

1. Very limited grasp on subject material, to the extent that the speaker cannot recall a single appropriate word to describe what he/she is attempting to formulate. I find it terrifying that these are the words of a graduating English lit student. This person could be teaching in a school in just over a year's time.

2. Shows complete lack of intellectual curiosity, rigour or interest in the subject. The speaker has evidently failed to comprehend the entire purpose of degree-level work and is instead bring a yr6-GCSE mindset to his/her work: topics are to be visited ONCE, in limited detail, and to revisit them from a different angle is deemed an assault on his/her blissful ignorance.

Aloha: "Churchill was using it as a joke".
So how do we know that the OP's students weren't also joking?

Sounds like a bit of a cop out to me. "Ain't" was much more commonly used in 18th and 19th century aristocratic speech, or so I infer from reading novels from those centuries.

possibly

gah

There is a world of difference between a comment in classroom (possible done deliberately to annoy notoriously pedantic Dr Shylock for all we know) and the language these students use in their academic work and, for that matter, when standing in front of a class.

If they used that style of language in writing, then that would be a problem.

Plus they're undergraduates, not about to be unleashed on our children!

I wish I shared your confidence.
My five year old speaks with greater eloquence than those students.

Clearly the students shylock is referring to do have a good grasp of English - I hardly think they'd be heading for a 2:1 if they didn't!

Elasticwoman, but Churchill was using it as a joke! He wasn't ignorant of the basic rules of his native tongue.
I don't care if the person fixing my electrics or delivering my post or performing Swan Lake uses incorrect grammar. I do object when they are supposed to be studying English at degree level and hoping to be teachers.

this has reminded me of an old schoolground threat -
"I'm going to frow you wif a stone"

• is enough to drive me to drink!

do they not listen to the Prodigy?

(I suppose they are a bit young )

slightly off topic I was rather alarmed today when my (bright) lower sixth form class in biology couldn't tell me what 'inhale' and 'exhale' meant!

FFS my 10 year old knows that!

I was just thinking too about how my mum speaks. For instance, she routinely leaves the -ly off the end of adverbs. Do I notice it? Yes. Would I correct her? No way. But did I grow up and learn to speak correct?

Ha ha... I mean 'correctly' of course...

Yes. I did!

How far do you push this? A (distant) member of my family won't let his kids spend time with their grandmother 'in case they pick up her accent'. How hurtful is that?

Obviously this isn't the same issue that shylock started with, but since it has turned into a general discussion I thought I'd raise it.

Sorry I have not read whole thread but may I say to the person who doesn't like "ain't" that Sir Winston Churchill famously said of a portrait of him "It makes me look like an idiot - which I ain't!". Standards had obviously slipped at Harrow towards the end of Victoria's reign.

chocolatedot - that's exactly what ellbell is saying, and I agree, hypercorrection is more annoying. Excessive use of apostrophes would be another example.

As for "where does bad grammar end and dialect begin?" - well in general there's no such thing as bad grammar. All speech conforms to grammatical rules. they may not be the rules you use but they are rules. bad grammar is you when rules break the.

Bundle: I know a lot of "street" slang comes from films. But actually if you listen to people speaking, they don't speak exactly like any film character, but they use bits of language from all sorts of different places. I admit, I haven't been to Slough lately but I bet teenagers speak a different "street" language there than they do in say Colchester. Some forms will be common to the two but is that important? does community have to be a physical community?

But surely the use of 'whom' in that instance is simply gramatically incorrect so doesn't it all get back to not being sufficiently well educated in the basics?

See... that Senora is talking sense {in the sense that she is agreeing with me, in my initial post, before it all went off on a fugue ).

If this was part of an informal chat and the students were on relaxed terms with their lecturer Dr Shylock and felt able to use their everyday language with her, then it's fine. If, however, they were unable to distinguish between situations when such usage is appropriate and those when it isn't (if they wrote in an essay 'I will discuss the use of metaphor in Hamlet, what Shakespeare wrote after he done Othello') then that would be worrying!

IME, the opposite problem is just as much of a problem. That is, students hypercorrect themselves and end up writing gobbledigook. 'Who'/'Whom' is a key source of this. They think that 'whom' is somehow more 'academic' sounding, so they write things like: 'In this poem the author, whom experienced a strong bond with his city, talks about xyz'. Or they use words that they think sound more intellectual, but end up using them inappropriately.

[Oh, and by the way, I have no idea in what order Shakespeare wrote his tragedies, so don't yell at me if I've got it wrong. I dropped English after A'level!]

And where exactly does straightforward bad grammar end and 'dialect' begin? Who makes that distinction?.

I don't mean the streets they live in, I mean the image put across in films, music videos etc. I grew up watching The Sound Of Music and The King & I but I didn't talk like them

what is street culture if it's not community?

they are pretty bloody posh sounding