Small Word Preservation Society

My phone pinged and flashed "Happy Mother's Day you." It was 2am. I've been awake since, internally ranting about the 'little words' being important too.

I  want to ask him, "Did you mean,'Happy Mother's Day to you'or were you going for the Joey, from Friends style, 'Happy Mother's Day, you.' said with a wry smile and an ironic wink?

Just lately I've become very protective of 'little words', as we used to call them. Charades taught us how important and how many of them they were. At Christmas, you'd pull 'Out of Africa' from the Charade hat, sigh and hold three fingers up.

"Three words."

You nodded and held one finger up.

"First word."

More nodding followed by holding your thumb and forefinger close together.

"Little word." 

Nodding. Then a shouted list of small words from all directions would elicite furious shaking of the head.

"The, in, and, of, he, she, it, him, her, on, to, off, up."

Eventually, you might get to, "out," slapping one finger on your nose, pointing to the person who said it with the other hand, hoping you hadn't made your nose bleed, before repeating the process again.

As soon as the family had guessed 'out of' you were there and the relief of not having to mime 'Africa' was overwhelming.

Now that I'm a grumpy I find myself correcting these little words in people's speech. I can't help it. 

I shout at the TV, "Go to Argos! It's an imperative statement you stupid advertisers, you are trying to get people to go to the shop, you are not cheering the blooming shop on. It's a shop, it doesn't have the power of movement so it can't go anywhere!"

Phew! It's exhausting but I have to do it - everytime it's on. 

Whenever a presenter says, "We could of seen that," I am compelled to shout 'Have, have. We could have seen that!"

These poor little words. What have they ever done to be treated so badly? A small word preservation society might be a good idea but some idiot would undoubtedly mangle 'word' and we would end up preserving the Disney ride with the annoying tune.

I'm not particularly fond of my trait of compulsively correcting people's speech. It reminds me of an old physics teacher I used to have. She would repeat back almost everything anyone said to her with a correction. She taught PE, as well as physics and looked as though she would win any race or fight. I was quite scared of her and always tried to avoid any conversation. One day, in the fifth form it was unavoidable.

"Miss, I have to go and see Hope-Simpson for my careers talk."

Her arms folded aggressively across her ever expanding menopausal breast, head tilted to one side. "May I go to see Mr Hope-Simpson for my careers talk?"

And here I made the worst mistake of my life. One that I am still ashamed of today.

"Well, you can if you want but I think he's expecting me and I would have thought you were too old for careers advice."

Now matter how hard I try I can not remember what happened next.

On Friday, feeling particularly grumpy, dressed in a Pikachu onesie I succumbed  to a rant about small words.

"Miss, Can I go for the toilet?"

"No."

His shoulders sloped down and he went to turn.

"Can I go to the toilet?" I corrected.

Luckily, he wasn't cursed with my wit and he just looked at me and scratched his head, frozen on one foot, unsure of whether to go back to his place to keep waiting for his computer to log on or scuttle off to empty his bored 

bladder. 

"You see, you need to use the little words properly. You can't go for the toilet because the toilet isn't here and even if it was it couldn't go instead of you. You could go for a pee but as you used the word toilet then the little word needs to be to."

He still looked at me blankly.

"You used the wrong preposition."

"Oh. Can I go to the toilet, then?"

Thank goodness for grammar lessons.

What do you know?

There's a quiz doing the rounds on Facebook of the current SATs grammar test. I got 60%; all good guesses. http://www.sats2016.co.uk/think-youd-pass-your-sats-in-2016/

Grammar is something that hasn't actively been taught in schools since comprehensive schools were introduced and so only a few linguistically interested adults will be able to do well on this test. Most of us don't know our subjective clause from our adverb but luckily are still able to tell our arse from our elbow.

 Normally these quizzes set parents against each other. Some say, "These poor f-ing kids. I only got two right. Give them back their childhood." While others say, "What? How can you be proud that you only got two right? Only a thicko would be happy with that. What are our teachers doing? All children should know this stuff. How will they cope in life if they don't?" 

This is proving to be different. Most adults finally agree on something. If you can use a preposition phrase do you really need to be able to label it as such? I remember a similar conversation between my friends after we'd watched a new sex education film to be shown to our children. A parent was very cross about the idea of her 8 year old being introduced to the word clitoris.

"Why? Why does she need to know that at eight?" she shouted at the teacher.

"It will save confusion if she ever needs to go to the doctors about a problem with it," the teacher replied matter of 

factly. 

I mentally ran through my not-so-exhaustive knowledge of clitoral disorders and decided that if I had any of them I would still probably say, "I've got a problem down there." I might even just mouth 'down there' while pointing. 

The poor teacher might not have been happy with eight year olds suddenly calling each other 'Clitorises' in her class either but teachers don't choose the content of education; that's the job of the government. Teachers who never learnt the grammar rules and labels themselves as as a child are now required to instill a message of their importance into the children they are teaching. This is going to be a tough sell. 

When I watch 'clever celebrities' on TV, such as Richard Osman or Steven Fry, I am always struck by how much trivia they seem to know. I wonder if they can define all the determiners in a sentence and then I wonder if it really matters and I start to get philosophical about the point of education in the first place. I used to tell my school-reluctant son that he had to go to school to try out lots of different things in order to find the one that he'd like to spend the rest of his life doing but I'm not sure the Government would agree with me. 

In the school where I work (not teaching grammar, you will be relieved to hear), there are six year olds who know more facts about dinosaurs, or birds, or Romans, or snakes, or flags than I could ever know. Actually, not flags because that was my six year old self's specialist subject. Some of these children will never be clever according to standardised tests because the Government isn't interested that you know that a velociraptor had thirty teeth.

Schools work really hard to teach children some of the things they think are just as important: being polite, eating with a knife and fork, playing outside without getting mud everywhere, queueing (a very important British skill learnt in Primary school), riding a bike, swimming, life saving, building an igloo and dodging snowballs (if we ever get any snow).  They do this while trying to cram the test facts into those little heads. 

This week the oldest children in our school were learning life saving skills in the hall. The music room can only be accessed through the hall, so every class had a glimpse of their future. They were all fascinated. They knew they were missing out on something, even if they weren't quite sure what. Trying to engage children to learn about the pentatonic scale and ostinato patterns was tough. 

In a quiet moment a child said, "They're doing sex in there."

"No, they're not!!! Lifesaving! They're doing lifesaving."

"Oh, that's what she told me," he said grumpily nudging the little girl next to him.

"I said sex education. I thought it was," she protested rolling her eyes at me.

"No. Lifesaving."

Loud music started: Staying Alive by the Bee Gees.

The temptation was too great not to go and look through the glass door. He bounced up and I followed him to encourage him to sit back down.

"See, I told you!"

Fifteen children were leaning over dummies, kissing them and bouncing up and down in time to the music. 

I suddenly saw the Government's point. I would have been less embarrassed if the children in the hall had been learning how to avoid a dangling participial. 

Shakespeare couldn't spell

I was good at spelling at school. In third year juniors (year 5) I was in the top spelling group and had to learn words like government, parliament and accommodation. My teacher was a bit fierce and you didn't want to annoy her because teachers were still allowed/encouraged to wallop the wayward.  So, I always learnt my spellings. I also read books because I loved them, which is what made me good at spelling. When she realised this she would recommend things for me to read and I thought that meant that she liked me.

 One day, however, when I was laughing at a classmate for not being able to spell something, Mrs T blew my mind, "Shakespeare couldn't spell either and you'd do well to remember that Missy."

Whether she just wanted to give more ammunition to my playground tormentor who had spent the whole of my junior school life teasing me for being 'posh' and 'swotty' or she was making a valid point I wasn't sure but I ran through the scenario in my mind. 

"Julia, how do you spell government?"

"G O V E R M E N T."

"Don't be silly, girl, you know it has an N in it."

"I know because it comes from the verb to govern but you said that Shakespeare couldn't spell so I thought I'd try to be more like a famous writer."

"Pull your skirt up!"
The sharp slapping sound and imagined sting of my upper thigh brought me back to reality and I was glad for one of the few times in my life that I wasn't a boy, who had to drop their trousers.  My imaginary smack was less humiliating because of my gender.

When you write often you make mistakes. Despite being good at spelling I expect my blogs have been littered with inaccuracies. Usually these are just typos . I prefer to write quickly and then go back, read, re-read and edit.  I'm not quite so good at grammar and some punctuation is a complete mystery. My daughter tells me that the extra space after a full-stop is no longer necessary.  Grammar wasn't a large part of the curriculum when I was at school.  I can make what I write understandable from copying what I've read but participles could dangle, unnoticed all over my writing.  I worry about this.  People get very cross about these things.

Michael Rosen had a lively Twitter debate this morning about the identification of 'my' as possessive pronoun.  I worried.  Had I used 'my' as a possessive pronoun?  What is a possessive pronoun, anyway?

It turns out that 'mine' is the possessive pronoun and 'my' is just a pronoun.  (Luckily there are some very good grammar Nazi-bloggers out there).  I relaxed a little.  I would always say, "This blog is mine," Does it matter that I can't name them, if I can use words properly?

Similarly, I wonder if spelling really matters.  I know it matters to the angry people on Twitter. Whole swathes of the country are planning to boycot Waterstone's in Walthamstow because, "how dare a bookshop not be promoting good literacy!"

A typo missed by the proof reader but wait, what about the missing apostrophe? Along with Sainsburys, Waterstones decided to drop its apostrophe in 2012 but have still to change the signage on their shops.

Does it matter?  We know what the sign means.  Shakespeare couldn't spell.  To be fair to him all spelling was phonetic until as recently as 1800.  When researching my family tree I found a Mary Sell or Mary Sele or Mary Cell, or Mary Cele and they were all the same person.  Even educated people like vicars or the keepers of parish registers couldn't agree.

Not being able to agree is very common when people are talking about spelling.  Does it matter if a four year old writes 'carot'? What if the teacher writes it like that on the board after that child identifies the sounds for her? I don't know the answer to that but I know that everyone will have an opinion and will be determined that they are right.  I expect that there are as many pieces of research showing that it doesn't matter as there are showing that it is vital. Teaching is hard.

Today, I was teaching Sammy Fain's songs from Alice in Wonderland.  The words were up on the whiteboard.
"Miss, that word is wrong."
"What word?"
"The one with the red line underneath."
"You mean Slithy Toves?  Does anyone know what the slithy toves are?"
They all agreed that those were made-up words.
"What about a Caucus race?  Is that a real thing."
They all agreed.  Caucus was a real word and they all thought they knew what it meant. Voices were raised.
"It's a flower."
"No it's not it means being careful."
"Don't be silly.  Our upstairs phone is caucus."

Oh, and I thought it was a convocation.  Awkward.

Grammar and Trolls

I like correct grammar. People who like words like the proper use of grammar but even the most skilled of wordsmiths make mistakes.

Twitter, with it's quick 140 characters seems to have sparked a huge divide 

between the grammar nazis and those who couldn't care less. People get quite worked up about a missing apostrophe or a mis-spelt word. It has also become the new battleground on which to fight Trolls.

I blame the seventies for our obsession with Trolls. Who didn't keep a couple of those ugly plastic dolls in their pocket to stroke their brightly coloured hair every time they were upset or a bit stressed? Our obsession with Trolls has become so great that I found an article online, listing the 21 types of Internet Troll, which must mean that anyone who comments on anyone else's internet exclamation is a Troll. We complain about them but secretly we love those little guys.

The Grammar Troll is, according to the article I read, a thing in it's own right but it has become the favourite Troll-bashing technique amongst the writers and thinkers that are most popular on Twitter. Piers Morgan has said in an interview with GQ Magazine that he finds correcting Trolls' spelling an effective revenge tactic and I have noticed that others are following in his footsteps.

Another good example is @mysadcat, which is a comedy account, where someone puts pictures of their cat looking sad. I'm not quite sure why people get upset about this but his blog shows how he has been dealing with it.

http://littlecatdiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/man-picks-completely-pointless-fight.html

They are funny to read but I'm not sure they really work. Apart from anything else it gives them a wider readership than they could have ever hoped for without the re-tweeted comment and people who post nasty comments in response to something funny or well written are only going to have their suspicion that that person is a smug wotsit confirmed.

Although I like good spelling and grammar I can't help wondering if it really matters. If you understand what is being said does it really matter if it says there, their or they're?

If you are killing Trolls with red-pen correction then it is only fair that you do the same to yourself.

You have to have massive respect for this Guardian Journalist, who originally tweeted, "The only results that matter today: Magazine ABC's at 12noon. If you can bare to wait."

About the P word

There is no word in the English language more frustrating than 'practice' or 'practise'.

There you go, with problem number one.  There are not many words in English that mean the same thing but are spelt differently depending on whether they are are a verb or a noun.  If we were Spanish or German we would be used to this sort of thing but we're not.  The rule, as I understand it, is that if it's a verb (a doing-word to those, like me, who never did any grammar after primary school) it has an S but if it is a noun then you use a C.  So you say, "I going to practise the piano." or "I am going to do my piano practice." Grammatical pedants get very upset if you get it wrong.  It can be seen as a huge crime.  Someone I know was laughingly telling me about when she was being a supply teacher last week and the class teacher had left her a note, which said, "Please get the children to practice their spellings."  She told me that she left her a note back, which said, "Practise your spellings - a verb - maybe you should practise yours."  Now, I like good grammar but I also like good manners and I thought that was a little rude.  I wonder if she will ever be asked to do supply for that teacher again?
Also, if you are American it doesn't matter.  It's always practice. It has taken me a good year to convince my computer that the word practise does exist and not automatically spell-correct it for me.

The second problem with practice is that it is just frustrating. Sometimes, no matter how hard or how often you practise nothing seems to improve.  I find piano practice particularly frustrating. I practise until my fingers ache and .....well, and nothing.

Practice is boring.  You do the same thing over and over again.  Then you do it again.  And then you give it another go.  W.E. Hickson is credited with inventing the proverb, "If at first you don't succeed, try try and try again."    He knew about practice, as he was a singer who wrote the 'improved version of the National Anthem.  I think I prefer W.C. Field's version, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again and then quit.  There's no point being a damn fool about it."

Today I decided to have a day off and do no practice. I read a book, sat on the sofa, and watched the GBBO master classes. Then I had this stupid idea that I would be able to make the 8-plaited loaf, if I practised it.

I suppose it's a little better but I want it to be PERFECT!

And there's another P-word!