On the platform at Cambridge station was a poster for a Jeremy Clarkson book. It had a photo of Clarkson looking adorably doleful and a caption that read: 'Dads. Everything they say. Everything they do. Everything they wear. Its all completely wrong.' Oh, the wit. But note the absence of the apostrophe in 'its'. I know it is way too much to ask that Jeremy Clarkson should take an interest in the literacy of his posters, but surely someone at Penguin ought to care.
We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but evidently don't realize that there are fundamentals. Many people...seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle indiscriminately through any collection of words. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: 'Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results'. All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is 'the daily Telegraph'? Is it really possible to be that unobservant?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an email from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in the UK. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: 'Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families...'
In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and got the name of her own department wrong - this from a person whose job it is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a paediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word children's twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children's specialist working in a children's hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?
People everywhere have abandoned whole elements of grammatical English, and I don't understand it.I was watching a Brian Cox television documentary in which he was standing in a field in Mexico talking about bombardier beetles when he said: 'The bombardier beetle and me, and in fact every living thing you can see, are exposed to the same threat... Me and my friend the beetle have both reached the same solution.' Now don't get me wrong. I have great respect for Brian Cox. He has a brain so big that it crosses whole time zones, and he is normally impeccable with the language, so why on earth would he say 'the bombardier beetle and me' when it is surely more natural, and clearly more respectable, to say 'the bombardier beetle and I'?
Soon after this, I watched a documentary by another eminent young scientist, Adam Rutherford, and he said: 'Now I've got just 33 vertebrae in my spinal column, but Belle here [a boa constrictor] has got 304, and the amazing thing is it's the same handful of genes that determine how many vertebrae both me and her have.'
Then I was watching a repeat of Outnumbered, which had this snatch of dialogue in it:
Outnumbered kid: 'Why do I have to look after Karen?'
Hugh Dennis: 'Because me and Mum and Ben are going to be at Ben's parents' evening.'
Hugh Dennis was educated at Cambridge in real life, and he plays a teacher who should really know better.
Then I heard Samantha Cameron, wife of the Prime Minister, say to a television interviewer, 'Me and the kids help to keep him grounded.'
So here is all I am saying about this. Stop it.
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