I read an editorial in the local paper recently (or maybe it was a letter to the editor? I forget.) about the lack of educating in American education. Kids are graduating from high school with no math or writing skills, no sense of history, no reasoning abilities, and the writer complained that it is has gotten worse over the past 20 years, and seems to be snowballing.
Based on my own experiences, I have to agree. Not all the kids are ignorant of the most basic skills, but the proportion of those who are seems to be increasing. It's not just the kids. I occasionally get a newsletter from the school district, and I amuse myself by correcting all the spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and factual errors with a red pen. I usually find at least 20 errors in a four page flyer. Simple, basic errors, nothing fancy. Then I stick it in an envelope and mail it back anonymously. The educationally handicapped are teaching the educationally deprived, so it's no wonder it's getting worse exponentially.
My personal peeve is the misuse of words. Andy Rooney has complained that people are misusing words, and nobody corrects them because it isn't polite to correct them (not "PC"), "besides, you know what they mean....", so that the meaning of words gets diluted, to the point where we really don't know what they mean. And if you aren't sure how your listener is going to interpret a word, you can't use it any more. So the misuse of words has decreased Andy's own vocabulary! He can't use many perfectly good and very precise words any more.
My own favorite example: "Problematic" does not mean "is a difficulty" (in a negative sense). It means "is a question to which we do not know the answer, but want to know" (nothing bad about it). So if someone asks if John is coming to the party, and I answer, "John's attendance is problematic", all I'm saying is that we don't know whether John will be there or not, and I would really like to know. But since there's a very good chance someone will run to John and tell him I don't want him to attend, I can't use a perfectly good word any more. A word, by the way, which in 11 letters expresses what otherwise takes 11+ words. Newscasters are the worst assassins of "problematic".
I get very annoyed at people who say that the language is not static, it's living, therefore meanings can change. I'll agree we can add and delete words, but I don't agree that we can change the meaning of a word to its near opposite, to where it loses all meaning! The word is then no longer living - it's dead! Jay and I used to politely snarl at each other about our choice of dictionaries. He loved his Webster's. I despise Webster's. The Oxford is the only real dictionary. (Jay said the Oxford is elitist. How is that bad?) The problem I have with Webster's is that it documents actual lowest-common-denominator usage, which is often incorrect. (Ok, now I understand "elitist", but I still don't see how it's bad.) Webster's legitimizes common errors. You will often find two contradictory definitions for the same word in Webster's. Problematic, for example, is defined in Webster's as both an open question and a difficulty. WRONG!
Two days worth of reading/listening has yielded the following:
Sight vs. site
Your vs. you're
Then vs. than
Advise vs. advice
Lose vs. loose
Formerly vs. formally (as in "she was formally a resident of...." in an obituary)
Illiterate vs. illegitimate (believe it or not)
Envelop vs. envelope
Fewer vs. less
Died vs. dyed
Lie vs. lay (and tenses thereof)
Its vs. it's (Please, teachers out there, explain that the possessive "its" is like "his" and "hers". No apostrophe.)
Different from vs. different than ("than" is always incorrect)
Enormity has nothing to do with measuring tapes. You can speak of "the enormity of his crime", but not about "the enormity of the elephant".
The past tense of "bid" is not "bidded".
The one that makes me howl in anguish: Incident vs. incidence. Especially "incidences". (Making "incidence" plural makes my typing fingers hurt.) I think people put "instance" and "incident" together, and that's how they get "incidences".
When Daughter was young, I insisted on correct pronunciation, on the theory that if you pronounce it correctly, you have a better chance of spelling it correctly. I am vindicated by people who can't spell "liberry" or "athaletic".
We used to be able to improve ourselves by listening to educated people speak, and by reading, and then by paying attention to and imitating what we heard and read. No longer. That can be downright dangerous. Newscasters, commercials, educators, newspaper reporters and editors - none of them want to admit that they have a responsibility to use language responsibly. So we get sentences like "The police say that Oak Street is problematic, after several incidences of purse-snatching." Yeah, I know what they mean, but would they know what I mean if I used the words correctly? It would not be a problem if they didn't know. The problem is that they would THINK they DO know.
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