Columnist vents on our tendency for improper English.

A12

Hanne Armstrong

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Its onreal, the way we talk and right.

Or, correctly written and pronounced, it's unreal, the way we talk and write.

I'm sick and tired of poorly spoken and written English. Our language is the main tool that we use to communicate, and if the tool is dull, cracked or broken, the communication will be likewise.

And I'm not talking about the shorthand that text messaging is bringing into being, with its LOL's and CU's. If a :) is good enough for a smiley face for you, then more power to you. At least the language of messaging is a chosen response to the need for brevity. With luck, we'll retain our ability to distinguish between the language of a thumb on a tiny keypad and the language of full and rich written and oral expression.

Problem is, it's hard to distinguish one thing from another if we don't really 'get' the other. And, the more I hear and see, the less I think we 'get' the language we're supposed to be speaking.

And yet people are graduating from public and private schools in droves, so they must have a basic grasp of the language, mustn't they? Seemingly not, because there's getting to be as much misguided use of the language in supposedly educated circles as in any other. Don't teachers teach basic language skills anymore? Do they know how to use language correctly themselves? If they don't, it's high time they did. Somebody, somewhere along the line, has got to improve our use of our own language, and it's my hope (albeit growing more and more feeble) that teachers in the schools are the ones to do it. But I digress. Our fourth or fifth rate education system isn't today's topic.

Back to language. Want some for-instances? Fine. But believe me, these are just the tiniest tip of a massive and unmelting iceberg.

First up, since when is the u in words like unreal, unprepared, etc., pronounced as though it was the o in on? Un-whatever rhymes with bun or fun, not on or Jon. Yet streets and newscasts are filled with people being 'onprepared,' 'ondernourished,' or whatever. Get real.

Then there's route. Rhymes with root, toot, boot. Not with doubt or shout. If you've got a paper route, or are looking for a highway route number, that's different from your team suffering a rout (a sound defeat) at the hands of the opposing team. Rout is the one that rhymes with shout and doubt. But somewhere along the way, somebody got confused or lazy, and in the last 10-20 years or so, particularly in the US and merrily exported via movies and television, people have been driving along defeats instead of routes, and paperboys have also suffered defeats instead of routes. And rout can also be a verb. Like, the bad guys routed the good guys. Kind of like mispronunciation is routing correct pronunciation. Let's get on top of things before this particular mistake leaches from the oral into the written word. Know how to say what you mean, and take the trouble to get it right.

Another pet peeve: mobile, pronounced as though it rhymes with noble. I suspect this comes from the self-described world's largest publicly traded international oil and gas company, ExxonMobil. The Mobil there, without the 'e' at the end, can rhyme with noble if it wants to. But mobile does not. The last syllable of mobile sounds the same as the last syllable in projectile, erectile, or juvenile. So stop it. There's nothing noble about mobile.

And then we come to one of my absolute favourites. It's at this point too that the spoken and written chaos meet. Lay. Lie. Today, I lie down for a nap. Yesterday, I lay down for a nap. Today, I lay the book on the table. Yesterday, I laid the book on the table. "B-b-but," you stutter, determined to be right, "what about 'Now I lay me down to sleep'? See? I lay down." No, you don't lay down. You lay yourself down to sleep. Lay needs an object, unless it's appearing as the past tense of lie.

An object? Tense? Does anybody learn grammar anymore? Whoops, I promised not to digress into education again.

Even if you didn't learn the right way to use language in school, in these days of high-speed internet there's absolutely no excuse for mangling the language. There's no reason for public speakers, politicians, actors, teachers, and John Q Public to continually mispronounce, misspell and miscommunicate.

If you're not sure whether the word you want is beech or beach, lie or lay, or you're not sure how to pronounce something, look it up. Don't have a dictionary? Threw out your grammar book? No excuse. This is the 21st century. There are websites. Tons of them.

Try askoxford.com, dictionary.cambridge.org, dictionary.com, onlinegrammar.org, english4today.com. Don't rely on your spell-checker, especially with the distinction between Canadian and US spellings of many words. Don't rely on what you hear detectives on some tv show saying. It's your language. Look it up. Get it right.