PARTS AND PLACES - A RANT!

The comprehensive education system is now well into letting down its second generation of scholars.  Amongst the better-documented failings of this regime, there lies one which has probably escaped the notice of many commentators.  It appears that many adults are emerging from this woefully inadequate institution not knowing their parts from their places!  Let me explain.

I listen faithfully to the BBC regional radio stations, and I have heard reports (both on Radio Shetland and Radio Aberdeen, but I have no doubt the problem is more widespread than this) of events TAKING PART and participants TAKING PLACE in them.  This has become so prevalent recently that it is beginning to make my curmudgeonly, pedantic and pre-comprehensively-educated blood boil.  I feel obliged to record my protests against this latest assault on good usage of the English language.

If, during my secondary schooldays, I had presented a piece of composition, containing such a piece of grammatical incorrectness, to Lollie or Johnnie Graham (the English teachers at that noble establishment), it would have returned adorned with an enthusiastic chiding in red ink.  The tragic thing is that mine is probably the last generation which will even notice the error.  I may as well enjoy my pedantry while I'm still around and there are still a few of my elders and contemporaries who have a clue as to what I'm talking about.

It makes me sad to think that grammatical refinement will soon be an obsolete irrelevance to most people.  The standards which my generation regarded as commonplace, at school and beyond, will soon be considered unnecessarily esoteric, and have no place in the digital age.  After all, some may argue, what are spell-checkers for?

Spell-checkers will give the correct (probably American) spelling for any word considered by the compilers to be in common usage, and this should explain its inadequacies and limitations quite well.  It takes no account of context, English idioms, figures of speech or other phraseological idiosyncrasies which make this language so much larger and richer than the sum and spelling of its words.

The same applies to the dialect of my dearly-beloved Shetland, which once contained thousands of words which were entirely unique to this part of the world.  They do not appear in any spell-checker, and each subsequent generation is losing thousands of these words and phrases - for ever.  There are many reasons for this, chief of which is that the way of life which was defined by these words and phrases, and to which they pertained, no longer exists.  What is left is being corrupted, mostly (but not entirely!) unintentionally by those using it, and by racial, cultural and socio-political influences.

There are probably few who will mourn the passing of grammatical correctness (which has been largely replaced by the hilariously ultra-pedantic political sort).  However, written prose and general social conversation are much the poorer for its absence, and I wish I could feel smug about being one of the last generation to know its parts from its places.