Travelling by train this week I saw the following notice: Please Take Care When Alighting the Train.
It is true that setting fire to locomotives can prove hazardous to health, but should we be providing safety advice to arsonists?

Of course, we all know that the ‘from’ is missing, thereby turning passenger welfare into a billboard for pyromaniacs, but sadly, we don’t all know that the ‘from’ is missing, and if those responsible for writing, printing, proofing and pasting public proclamations, don’t know, then why are we surprised that once again anyone who can just about write The Cat Sat On The Mat, has been awarded an A grade in this summer’s exams?

I suspect that the illiterate educated who were cheated out of qualifications by a well-meaning government determined to prove that we are all equally bright and able, are now filtering through into the system, and their illiteracy is going to affect us all. Many people in jobs that require a working knowledge of the English language, really believe that their mixture of TV, tabloid, and texting argot, is as good an English as any.

I don’t mind the signs for Iternity rings, or being told not to leave luggage in the vestible, or that the train is about to come to a complete stand – a circus trick certain to unite passengers and their luggage in the vestible, or that there is a special offer on striped mens pyjamas, or that Crystals Beauty Parlour caters for all genders – maybe she is a woman of the world and I am still stuck in the old binaries. As a country dweller, I am glad there is now such a thing as a hare stylist, and I will take my hares to be styled as soon as I can catch them.

I love it when my builder covers everything up with a Tar Pauline, but I am less happy when I hear about a bomb being de-ploded, or everything at half-prize, presumably for those who tried, but not hard enough.

Our school system, which tries, but not hard enough, because that would admit differences in ability and also failure, is turning out half-prize students who will fail us because we have failed them. Exuberance and idiosyncrasy of language keeps language rich and alive, but it is necessary to have a standard of clear, simple, grammatical English that everyone can both read and write. Such a standard is not difficult to achieve. This should save us from mass illiteracy of the everyday kind, and from convoluted office-speak, (I had a letter from a local solicitor recently telling me that as soon as he had a particular piece of information, he would ‘revert’ to me. As he and I have never been the same person, this will be difficult, and I wish he would just come back to me – that will do).

A good standard of general literacy will also make it easier for writers to write books that actually do something with language rather than just tell a story. The current fashion for story-telling, and the dead zone that is voice and style, has at its heart an indifference to language that is inevitable in a media-saturated, semi-literate culture like ours. As we do not know what a sentence is, we are hardly likely to care what a good sentence is, or to recognise a beautiful sentence that does more than convey meaning.

It is impossible to have high standards if we have no standards. If language is now evolving without grammar, without syntax, without spelling or punctuation, writers will have a hard time doing what literature does – expanding our emotional and imaginative range, by means of language. I have said before that if the language-base shrinks, then so does our capacity for complexity of any kind – complexity of feeling or of thought.

Of course, language that is not literature is used to convey complex ideas, but this does not happen on sound-bite TV, and less often even in the better newspapers. You can seek out the books, and some of us do, but most of us don’t. It is because most of us don’t that I would argue for higher standards of the written and spoken word in the media – the false democracy of dumbing-down forces us all to the same abysmal low level, instead of encouraging a bit of effort, a bit of concentration, from everyone.

Language is power, but language has to be learned. That’s worth thinking about as a new term begins.

01 September 2007