Dear Editor,
I read Mr Prescott Mann’s letter (`There is a continuing problem in language use in state and private media’, March 23, 2021) and understand his frustration with the daily battering that our spoken and written language receives in the media. While he pointed to a number of written errors in the state newspaper, these have parallels in the mispronunciations and erroneous English – subject and verb errors are notoriously common – that are prevalent in the broadcast media.
Errors are not only made by reporters and editors but by top officials within government and the private sector, and are also proudly emblazoned on vehicles with lines that are grammatically incorrect or else display misspellings.
This does have its humorous side if you can move beyond the initial frustration. A popular death announcement programme on a city television station presented me with two such that have stayed with me for years. In one, the death announcement scroll listed the deceased as a “Commissioner of Oats”, a position that must have engaged the dearly departed in a number of curious responsibilities.
Another death announcement scroll listed a relative of the deceased as working at the “DDL bottle-in-plant”. This is a head scratcher. Does the fault lie with the not-too-literate relative who wrote the script for the television station or with the editor who faithfully reproduced the error?
Using phonetic spelling for words occurs in newspapers as well. One that has stayed with me was published some years ago within Stabroek News’ Saturday feature pages. The writer referred to a “walldrobe”. He obviously pronounced “wardrobe” that way, and since he had no idea he was mispronouncing the word he did not know he was also misspelling it. A dictionary would not have helped.
Are these the fault of our education system or a laxity at the editing desks? Or both?
On the radio, I heard an announcer going on about cooking “lingwine”. It took me a while to figure out through contextual clues that he was talking about the Italian pasta “linguine”.
One word that is most often mispronounced by everyone is the word “condolences”. Whereas the “do” in the middle should be a long “doe” sound, it is most often shortened to a “duh” resulting in a jarring mispronunciation.
My pet peeve, however, is the constant misuse of the word “complement” for “compliment” and vice versa. On the menu of a restaurant at an international hotel, I once came across prawns that “complimented” the dish. This can lead one to much “Alice in Wonderland” type of daydreaming.
The larger issue brought up by Mr Mann points to an education system that is failing generation upon generation of our local population. We have the distinct advantage of having the world’s lingua franca – the English Language – as our local language and we should learn to use it well.
Language evolves constantly and the technology of the internet with shortened text communications now in popular usage will influence how it evolves. However, English is still the language we use to communicate and to disseminate information and ideas and if we fail to use it well we will lose the ability to make ourselves understood.
Sincerely
Ryhaan Shah
