To think that grammar/spelling standards are not what they were?

[Meandmarius]

I'm mid 30's and have noticed that most of my friends/peers are able to distinguish between 'your and you're', 'where, were, we're' and using the words 'have' and 'of' correctly.
I've noticed that in younger generations there just doesn't seem to be the same standard anymore and I wonder why that is.
Not saying for one minute that my own sp. and grammar is perfect - it isn't. I just wonder if there is as much emphasis on it nowadays as there was back in the day..

Dear LRD,

Hello,

S

But I'm not sure which point you're addressing, LaQ? yy, there was a move towards standardisation (pre-dating the printing press a bit), but I don't think I was saying there wasn't?

Wow.

What?

Is this like the 'let's see who you really are' bit at the end of Scooby Doo, when they remove the mask from the villan and discover it was the old caretaker all along?

Hamishbear, do I detect a dislike of the Cambridge Latin Course...?

They can't guess at A-Level, no matter what course they've followed!

Depends what you mean by everyone, LaQ! I think that's what I was getting at before - there's talk of decline in standards, but those with "poorer" language were more hidden before. Most children didn't learn Latin and Greek, really, did they?

And don't get me started on people who can't tell the difference between:

lose
loose

Aaaargh!!

Grace - :) - may drop you a PM.

Surely the development is two-fold:

Twenty or more years ago, you hardly ever encountered text that hadn't been proofread/edited. Family letters were just about the only exception. Nowadays anyone can post anything they like, to be published instantly. And nobody checks first to see if the sequence of tenses makes sense, or that the punctuation is accurate, or whatever.

This means also that what we read has less consistency. If you see "definate" as often as "definite" then how do you learn what is right?

Horry
Fair point. Even in offices I worked at, letters were always produced by typists who tended to check in the dictionary and with each other.
The advent of the word processor put lots of typists out of work and meant that the weaknesses in their bosses education could shine through.

Then again, I've always said that spell checkers are only good for those who can spell unless they have an excellent grammar context setting (and I'm yet to find one that does!)

I did some work for a boss who used to correct my corrections, having previously subbed for an editor who would correct "the food was so vile it made me retch" to "...wretch".

It is soul-destroying.

On the other hand, I now do a lot of proofreading for friends who know that I will find the rogue mistakes and highlight the ambiguities. The number of CVs (yes, I say "seeveez" so I spell it with an S) I've looked over...

"I just wonder if there is as much emphasis on it nowadays as there was back in the day.. "

You do realise that people were saying exactly the same thing about your generation when you were at school!

At dh's work (a university) they were informed by Human Resources that they couldn't put 'a good standard of written and spoken English' as a requirement for a secretarial job because it was discriminatory.
We think, of course, that HR had taken leave of their senses, and do not believe for a moment that it is illegal, but it does demonstrate the fear people can have these days about demanding correctness.

Tunip
I hope your DH and his colleagues named and shamed that HR staffer to their faculty dean.
Try getting a research grant application through without "a good standard of written and spoken English"

As I said above, if you cannot make yourself clearly understood to the intended audience of your communication, shut up.
Or learn grammar and diction

I am an English academic in a top university. Believe me, five years ago, I was in despair, but I genuinely believe things are getting better. I still spend lots of time banging on about commas/ the semi colon (not really my job, but hey - someone's got to do it), but I think most students are coming to us with a better standard of grammatical knowledge. Perhaps this is the result of a new wave of kids who have gone through a new (New Labour?) regime?? I was never taught grammar at school (state school, 1980s), but I did always read a lot so perhaps it just seeped in.

I can't be arsed to read all this thread however the OP should have tried a bit harder with her opening post. Within the first three words she screws up what she's complaining about.

Not the most constructive of comments, Frogman. It is such a shame that you 'can't be arsed to read all this thread', or indeed the remainder of my original post. There are some great viewpoints here and some fascinating information.

Heck, you mind learn something. I know I have.

In that post you quoted from I'm talking specifically about film and TV LaQueen, not about literature or spelling and grammar, which I can talk about if you like.

It's a well-established fact that early broadcast media audiences couldn't handle complicated plots, which is why many of us today struggle to understand why Charlie Chaplin was so popular, despite him being extremely skilled and sophisticated.

The first of the modern multiple-episode TV shows was a thing called Murder One in about 1995. People didn't believe that something on telly running over 20+ episodes with many characters and multiple plotlines would be a hit.

Yet it was fantastic and is really worth looking up. Honestly. It ran only for two seasons and the second was lame, but it spawned 24, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Picket Fences, The Sopranos, The Wire and many more that I've forgotten that we're so used to now that are mostly okay but sometimes sublime.

It really is a myth that people have dumbed down. How many people found out more about Roman culture and its empire from the hundreds of programmes and books prompted by Gladiator? Or Greek mythology after the film and comic book 300?

We choose what to consume from an ever-expanding entertainment market, which is an embarrassment of riches and to my mind can only be good. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is essentially entertainment, not an improving work. At least, I hope it is.

And yes, grimbletart I used 'which' when I should have used 'that'. That's why I don't like giving hostages to fortune on these threads but snigger when people do, as many have done. Of course, I'm far too polite to point that out.

ooh, murder one is ace!

small voice might

I was NOT taught grammar at school (I'm 39). I'm ashamed to admit that I learned most of my grammar from an old boss who would, nicely, take the piss out of me errors until I improved!

We're still friends, and I am very grateful to him. He taught me how to correctly spell separately and definitely. He also bought me the book "Eats Shoots and Leaves".

The point I am trying to make is that even if you weren't taught at school there should be nothing holding you back from learning grammar, if you want to.

The real problem is that there is no motivation in learning correct grammar as there is SO MUCH incorrect grammar around that it is usual and normal. :(

And in the year dot most people couldn't read and enjoy the Rubáiyát, Chaucer or what was in the Bible. Controlling the ability to read is an excellent way of controlling them.

On those grounds I'd champion literacy even if it was to a poor standard. You can always get better.

Yay Murder One !!

It's true that it's not people who have dumbed down, but ime we've definitely seen a dumbing down of language that I would attribute mainly to globalisation and technology, and it's definitely worldwide. Smaller languages are very much under threat by English, which is the main language of 'couchah' and economics... oh and by small languages, I don't mean ones we've never heard of, I mean French, German etc. ... languages we always thought were unassailable. The question is, will they be around in 100 years?

We're also losing more complicated constructions in English, in favour of a more elliptical, 'flat' style. For example, take relative clauses like: of whom, of which, none of whom etc. That stuff is just dying a death because people aren't in the habit of using those constructions and have forgotten how... it's easy to see it as richness being lost (and a lot of the time I do) but things always give way to other things, and I'd love to be alive to see what it's all like in 300 years....

limitedperiodonly
I'd have to say that the first of the multi plotline programmes was actually Soap and then things like Thirty Something or Hill Street Blues : where you either had to be in at the start or ask somebody who had seen it all.