What should colleges teach?

By Stanley Fish. The New York Times

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

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The English language isn’t rational

By Mary Belk, Opelika-Auburn News

Buffy: “Can Jody and me go out and play?” Mother: “May Jody and I go out and play.”
Buffy: “Aw, Mom, we wanna play by ourselves.”

Okay, it’s an old joke, but what parent hasn’t had a similar exchange?

English is a tricky language. It’s consistently non-rational. We cling stubbornly to functionless capital letters. And some of our spelling is absurd. Take the “gh” from laugh and the “iti” from ambition and “ghiti” spells fish.

So why is it important for schoolchildren to learn the difficult rules of subject-verb agreement, misplaced modifiers and dangling participles? Children who use bad grammar, poor spelling, slang and street lingo usually get their message across. Problem is, they don’t go very far as adults.

Language is one thing that separates humans from other animals. Orangutans, Gorillas, and Chimpanzees can be taught sign language (ASL). But, as anthropologist Leslie White points out, “Without articulate speech there can be no rules about families, marriage, or kinship; No military, political, economic, or religious organization; No rituals or ceremonies; No codes of etiquette or ethics; No laws.”

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Black day for the English language as UK officially bans common phrases

Dozens of public organizations in the U.K. have imposed bans on common words and phrases used by their workers and in their correspondence in an effort to be more politically correct.

Rather than write a scathing opinion piece on how appallingly stupid we think it is to ban such phrases, and how overly sensitive governments and people have become, we’ll just list a few of those banned phrases with the reasoning behind why they were banned and let you decide for yourselves.

Whiter than white - A phrase used to describe someone who would never do something bad, has been banned because it is believed to be racial and infer that black is bad or criminal.

Black Day - Used to describe a time of disappointment or shame in a situation, has been dropped from publically funded agency language because it is believed to have racial undertones…

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Evolution of English

By Imran Saifur

It is all too common these days to see people around the world manipulating the English language, be it online or during text messaging on mobile phones, by using acronyms such as "PCM—Please Call Me" and "TTYL—Talk to You Later," etc. This trend developed to accommodate the needs of the users, who are more diverse and faster changing than the language itself. But this mustn't be stigmatised as blasphemous to the integrity of English because these abbreviations are not amendments to the language but only show the limitations of the mediums used for communication.

For example, an online chatter, refusing to be limited by the sluggishness of key boarding on the PC, compensates by innovating abbreviations of expressions and tag words, such as "LOL -- Laughing Out Loud," to reduce the number of keystrokes. This cannot be termed as evidence of language transformation because "LOL" is not a new word, rather a tag for the larger expression.

But, yes, historically, since the first graphing, English has been being ceaselessly transformed by the transitory needs of civilisation…

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