Tag Archives: English

Murder of English

These days, especially in North India (no offense meant), people have a tendency to abuse and murder English. Reading facebook posts always puts me in throes of revulsion. Also, I am not even talking about accent (which is pardonable) or pronunciation yet. These are purely grammar and punctuation errors. This is surprising because English is one of the easiest languages to learn and with the simplest grammatical rules.
It’s more infuriating because most people these days consider it fashionable to use English for conversation within their family, instead of their native language.
I know that English is not our “National” language, but is still very important in today’s age, considering that almost everyone works for a foreign company. If you don’t like English, at least make an effort to correct yourself, failing which just write in any other language.
Following are the predominant mistakes made by people these days. I have included some examples from Facebook.
1. People are misers when it comes to using uppercase at proper places. People don’t start their sentences with capitals. Even worse is when they don’t write their names starting with Capitals. If you can’t write your name properly, you can’t write anything else.

2. When it comes to punctuation marks, the same people are very generous and use them liberally. It is very common to see sentences ending with multiple full stops (I am so sad……) or multiple exclamations (I am so happy!!!!!) or the combination of different punctuation marks (I am so drunk!!! Hell yeah !!!@!@@). People also use incorrect punctuation, as seen in the example above. Here’s another example

This is very surprising, considering that this guy had an affair with our office English coach. I guess they didn’t talk much.
Although, there are some people who don’t use punctuation much and merge several sentences into one.

3. People also make a lot of spelling mistakes, even for simple words. It’s like they don’t even make an effort.

4. People use incorrect grammar. This is the most common and widespread problem among people today.  Its as if they were all sleeping in class for years when the English teacher was working hard to teach us, or that they didn’t want to learn at all. Sometimes the sentences don’t make any sense at all. This is the worst example of English I could find, with examples of all of the above. I didn’t even erase the name

I attribute this degradation due to the following factors

  1. People don’t consider learning English an important thing to do. They somehow pass the exams and then forget about it during higher studies.
  2. Most English teachers in this country are English-illiterate themselves. I was lucky enough to have come across very good English teachers for most of my education timeframe.
  3. People don’t read/write much. Most people in North India (no offense meant) act surprised to know that people actually pay to read novels. One of the most common sentences I hear is “Padhai ki kitaabe kam hai jo aur kitabe khareed li?” (“Don’t we have enough study books that you got some more?”)
  4. The “hip-hop” culture has caused the worst damage to people. It teaches people to deliberately mis-spell and mis-pronounce words. Apparently emulating how black Americans speak (no offence to the black)  is considered cool.
  5. People also suffer from the lack of will to take criticism constructively. Such “correctors” are scoffed at and termed “Angrez” (“Englishman”).