I'll admit that when it comes to the English language I am a conservative, in the non-political sense of the word.

In the same way as when I go back to Rochdale, the town where I spent my childhood, I resent bitterly the fact that it has changed in some areas almost beyond recognition.

If I am honest, I want to do a little bit of time travel and go back to those innocent, simple days of the 1950s but the roads, architecture and planning decisions of the last half century won't let me.

Language is much the same. It evolves, as it must, but it cannot always be said that it benefits from that evolution.

But evolution is one thing and sloppiness and laziness are quite another.

New meanings of old words, and even completely new words, emerge as a means whereby we can all better express ourselves, or identify ourselves as belonging to particular groups, whether they be social, generational or professional.

Hence 'wicked' has evolved to mean almost the opposite of its original meaning. 'Gay' can no longer be used to describe a light-hearted, casual manner.

Indeed, it could be argued that that very light-heartedness itself has almost completely disappeared from society, along with the word that described it.

It is probably the fault of the media to some extent that our language, along with everything else, is dumbing down. Most of us learn our English from the telly these days.

You only have to read the letters that working class soldiers sent home to their wives and girlfriends during the two World Wars to be able to identify a definite decline in the understanding and use of our grammar and vocabulary, an understanding that has been viewed with disfavour by educational theorists for a generation.

I developed a minor passion for our language around the same time as an inspirational teacher taught us to understand the building blocks of language. Ask anyone today about the imperfect tense and they'll probably direct you to a tatty camp site.

All we can do in the face of a barrage of casual inaccuracy is root out the worst excesses.

I actually heard a teacher say "should of" the other day. None of us is without blame, but surely a teacher guilty of this monstrous distortion should be forced to write "I should have said should have' not should of'", several hundred times.

And I am attempting to persuade my daughters to communicate with me without the use of the word "like" preceding every phrase.

"She was like really angry."

"Oh, she wasn't really angry then?"

Another bugbear is the often ignored difference between moot' (rhyming with flute') meaning up for discussion and mute' (myoot) meaning silent.

Newsreaders on all channels fail to distinguish between the words "de-fuse" and "diffuse".

If I had a bottle of Rioja for every time I have been informed that a bomb has been spread all over the place, rather than rendered harmless, I would be permanently incapable.

But what chance do we have when the most powerful nation in the world elects as its leader a man who has pronounced that "Reading is the basics for all learning" and "They misunderestimated me".

February 14, 2002 13:39