Loathsome lousy language louts

Okay, so I grew up in the Oxford – London – Cambridge traingle which means, if I remember correctly from my A-level English lessons, I know how to speak proper. I grew up living in Suffolk, but spent my mid to late teens in Cambridge, meaning I can speak both the language of the farm and of academia with equal dexterity. I don’t really have a Suffolk accent – I wouldn’t, for example, see a man in a field and say ‘look, e’s shewn him a quoo’ (‘look, he is showing him a cow’ for the completely baffled), in the way my nonagenerian grandmother, who’s never left Suffolk, would. I don’t have BBC ‘R.P.’, but I do have a strange Irish habit of beginning sentences in stories with ‘to be fair…’, and an uncanny habit of writing in Hardy-esque back-stitching.

But here’s my whinge. Is it me or is language on the BBC being ‘dumbed down’ and affecting us all. This evening I was watching Children In Need and Fearne Cotton described the atmosphere backstage as ‘quite literally mad’. Now I know she’s hardly a researcher for the Oxford English dictionary, but in what sense was it ‘quite literally mad’? Are people running around in strait-jackets, emulating Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Is Sir Terry Wogan nipping backstage, hopping in circles saying ‘wibble’ to himself quietly under his breath?
The Cambridge English Dictionary has a number of possibilities for the word ‘mad’. I know that she meant that it was hectic, that everyone was running around with energy and enthusiasm, but isn’t this ‘metaphorically mad’. People are running around like mad people. It’s not ‘literally’ anything.

It’s not just that. This evening I read the BBC’s Interactice Text News. It’s never the most grammatically inclined journalism. Quite often it’s missing an ‘it’s’, a ‘the’ or ‘they’, or more often than not the actual subject of the sentence (‘today […] went […] on their way’). Today was different. Clearly they had a work experience lad in who was doing something useful like English at University. On BSkyB’s purchase of a large stake in ITV, it was said that it had ‘substantial potential for long term value creation’. Excuse me? You mean it was a good investment, surely? Paid by the word are we? Been subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Day’ by RSS Feed perhaps?

Most people are sick to the eye-teeth of people pointing at shops in the street and saying, ‘that should be Green Grocers, not ‘Green Grocer’s‘, or whatever it is, but we let this kind of sloppy language go do we? That special generation of Kylies and Jasons, the children of the late 1980s, will soon be going to University and beginning their essay on Chaucer with the opening line, ‘That Chaucer was just so good, quite literally a genius’. Pepys will become ‘quite literally a good diarist’. Hang on a minute, isn’t that sort of correct? Oh bugger, it’s affecting me already…