This is my first blog

I am eternally grateful to the teachers whose legacy, from junior school onwards, was my ability to spell correctly and use proper grammar. In my early school days, any misspelt word was circled in red and I had to write the word 10 times at the bottom of the page. It saddens me greatly, when seeing children’s school books nowadays, that NONE of the spelling mistakes are noted, so how can they possibly learn. I believe today’s teachers were probably the victims of the same poor education and with the advent of computer use in schools, they probably never learnt properly either! Of course, there are dyslexic people (I have had several bosses over the years, that could not spell at all), that is a totally different scenario. I find spelling mistakes in most people’s websites, always at least one on menus and even sometimes when reading a book – this puts me off and I end up reading the paragraph again, as my focus stays on the error.

Also, we have the American spellings creeping in – I hate seeing color instead of colour, center instead of centre, etc., etc. Computer spell checkers are not all set up with proper English either and a lot of these, to me slang words, are allowed by the checker.

Then we come onto grammar; there, their and they’re for example. I was taught very simply that ‘here’ and ‘there’ go together (similarly spelt), something belonging to someone, e.g. their house, their dog and lastly they’re as in short for they are. Also the proper usage of words like compliment and complement – a compliment would be, “That dress really suits you”, where as complement means things go well together, e.g. “Salt complements chips”. We have affect and effect. Affect is basically an action/change – bad teaching will affect your spelling, pollen will affect people with hayfever. Effect – you may change your accent for effect, as in to be noticed, etc., etc. Anyway, I will shut up now and get off my soap box.

I think we need to keep our identity and go back to ‘BBC English’. As for the use of apostrophes, most people just seem to put them in for effect – e.g. Santa’s with hats – no apostrophe required. Whereas Sarah’s friend is correct. Apostrophes are used with a ‘belonging word’; again an example would be Peter’s dog, David’s house, and so on.