`What has happened to standards of English in The Irish Times?" In the past few weeks, readers have had good reason to repeat this question, which appears every so often on the Letters Page.
Some of our spelling mistakes have been quite spectacular. A compliant taxpayer became a complaint taxpayer and, in the same vain, a man was considered to be weak, vein and self-centred. Bob Dillon gave a concert in Kilkenny, a play about Edgar Allen Poe was staged in Donegal and a fashion picture showed a guilded helmet. Other recent howlers include a competitor who came within a hare's breath of winning, a happy person for whom a dream came through, and an anxious person who waited with baited breath.
"Does no one in The Irish Times use the spellcheck facility that comes with all computers nowadays?" a reader asked. A reasonable question, it might appear, but the fact is that an electronic spellcheck can be more of a hindrance than a help.
Firstly, all the above bloomers would have passed any spellcheck. The curse of the homophone can slip through the most sophisticated program. Secondly, spellchecks fail to recognise many legitimate and correctly spelt words. Writers and editors must ignore so many of these that there is a real danger of missing genuine misspellings.
"There are far more spelling errors than ever before," said another reader. I asked Kieran Fagan, the Irish Times training editor and former sub-editor, for his view on standards. "A very good chief sub-editor gave me this piece of advice: `If someone under 40 has written a piece, get someone over 40 to edit it.' He believed that somewhere between two generations, the standard of teaching of English grammar and spelling dropped markedly. It was good advice and I followed it when I could. Unfortunately, he gave the advice 15 years ago."
Of course, pressures are greater today. We have far bigger newspapers than ever before, and bigger papers mean earlier deadlines for all departments.
Proof-reading in pre-computer days was more specialised. Two people were dedicated to the task: one to read aloud the reporter's edited copy, the other to check the typeset version. Nowadays, proof reading is one of the many duties of a sub-editor who must also check facts, edit for clarity and length, write headlines, choose pictures and lay out pages.
Yet another contributory factor at the moment may be our changeover to a new editorial computer system. Some staff are using the new system, some are still using the old one and some are in the process of being trained. Added to this confusion is the fact that many departments are being relocated to facilitate the new system.
No, says one old hand. None of this can be used as an excuse. He believes standards have fallen dramatically because of a lack of knowledge which results in a lack of interest. He says young people just don't care as much about English as those of us who had grammar and spelling beaten into us in primary school (sometimes, literally), when good language skills were considered to be the foundation of a sound education.
But there are other forces at work on the battlefield of English. Sweeping changes are taking place that may have a profound effect on the English language in these islands. American English is the order of the day on the Internet. The format of e-mails bears little relation to the old-fashioned letter, or snail mail as it's called now. Dear Sir or Madam is now Hi!
But it is the text message which may yet pose the greatest threat. Can English ever recover from the likes of this which was sent to customers by a telecommunications company: "Wot txt msgng cn do 4u?" Is the battle for the beauty of a finely honed sentence forever lost because of the exigencies of a tiny screen whose size forces teenagers to write "Cul8r" when they mean "See you later"?
We in this newspaper are committed to the fight for right because words are our trade. We will continue to battle for the difference between militate and mitigate, apprise and appraise, tortuous and torturous. But the rules of the English language are not set in stone. It is a living language and therefore open to change, as any examination of spelling and grammar through the mutations of centuries will attest.
English has no Academy to watch over it, such as there is, say, in France. Nor does English come under the aegis of any government department. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, for instance, a radical overhaul of German spelling is in train, organised by a conference of cultural ministers. Here we turn to texts such as Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, published in 1926, which has never lost its authority (though two later editions were not without controversy) and dictionaries such as Oxford and Chambers, which are widely accepted as arbiters of meaning and spelling.
But be afraid. Be very afraid. The latest edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary includes a section on abbreviations for text messaging.
Readers Report appears on the first Monday of the Month. Readers may contact the Readers' Representative's office by telephone: 01 6792 022; e-mail readersrep@irishtimes.ie; post The Irish Times, 8-16 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2.