I am truly delighted to report that Jose Carillo’s English Forum is far from alone in its crusade against bad English. In other parts of the world, the war is being waged on two major fronts—the eradication of the most irritating phrases in English in the mass media, and the elimination of bad English grammar and bad spelling particularly on the Internet.
Writing in the
National Post in Toronto, Canada, Robert Fulford says that such empty banalities as “at the end of the day” spoken by TV anchors today induce in him feelings of nostalgia for his youth in the middle of the last century, when that phrase “was already marked as laughable and those who used it were suspected of pretension.” He then makes a quick review of Jeremy Butterfield’s
Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare (Oxford University Press), which puts “at the end of the day” right at the head of the “Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions in the English Language,” along with what he calls expressions of omnipresent hatefulness like “at this moment in time” and “with all due respect.” To him, he says, their total eradication is the only option.
Read Robert Fulford’s “The most irritating phrases in the English language” now!Also in Canada, Shannon Proudfoot of the Canwest News Service looks into the possibility that electronic communication might in fact be destroying our collective literacy, and pays tribute to a small but devoted community of online wordsmiths doing battle with English grammar gaffes and bad spelling on the web. She specifically cites some grammar websites and blogs in Canada, the United States, and Australia that, largely for the love of the language, tell off linguistically bankrupt postings and haggle over grammatical issues in many a discussion thread. “Whenever you write about grammar,” she quotes Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, “people do crawl out of the woodwork brandishing their pet peeves.”
Read Shannon Proudfoot’s “Grassroots groups fight bad grammar on the Internet” now!