Oh, for the want of an editor ...

My goodness but reading the newspaper is becoming increasingly frustrating lately.

Perhaps it's been so for a long time now and I'm just becoming less tolerant as I age.

When I was in I believe about grade five or six, we were encouraged to read the daily newspaper to help us learn and apply our growing language skills.

I can recall the practice being one of the hallmarks of establishing my love of (and need for) reading a daily newspaper.

We would take articles of interest into class and our teacher would help us dissect them, taking every opportunity to teach us how the writer had used a particular turn of phrase to make a point or why the writer had chosen one word over another when clearly there were many that might have been used to illustrate the story.

And we did learn how to apply our developing language skills.

Today, language skills are not even taught in our schools.  Heck, they were barely being taught when MLC was going through the system.

And Lord love us if today's newspapers were to be used in the schools.  I guess they could be used to teach students how not to apply the language.  There are many examples of errors from which to choose.

For instance, following are some samples taken from The National Post  in the past couple of days alone.

January 24th:  "One in four students are depressed: Study"  

January 25th:   "Oprah Winfrey ... revealed that she had a half-sister ..."  

Same day, in another story:  "Four years ago Jamie Gillespie's woke up ..."  

And my favourite appears almost daily in numerous articles: 

"None of the charges have been proven in court."  Please, newspapers everywhere, "None of the charges HAS been proven ..."  (If you need help figuring this one out, consider that the word "none" is actually a contraction for "not one" and try the sentence again.)

Notwithstanding the difficulty I have when reading these, and many other errors in the newspapers, I have a terrible time listening to newscasts and hearing the dreadful misuse of grammar being uttered by some of this country's top newscasters.  Admittedly, on the rare occasion, an announcer will stumble and correct the poor grammar as it was written for broadcast.  Who's writing this stuff?

And don't even get me started on the various television shows I watch that propagate bad language applications -- in some instances of what should be very basic English.  I mean, really, is nobody paying attention?  Is there not anyone out there in TV-land who has a basic command of the English language?

Our children are learning how to speak by watching television.

For instance, I recall being really upset with Sesame Street (yes, I said Sesame Street!) when MLC was in Nursery School.  Apparently, I was the only parent who took the time to teach my child that Cookie Monster's use of "Me want cookie" was grammatically incorrect (never mind the ill manners that were being displayed).  Every other child in that Nursery School sounded just like Cookie Monster.  They had no concept of "I" -- only "Me."

Sad really.

My little chickadee used to groan at my insistence that she use correct grammar.  Yet today, she has become her mother -- and she now insists that her son speak correctly.  I hear her telling him the same tricks I taught her to help him figure out what's correct:  is it "I" or "me?" "take" or "bring?" etc.  So, I guess it's really true:  what goes around comes around!

For several examples of words that are often misused, check out John's list of frequently misused words.