Sir, - It seems that every time I turn on the television or listen, to the radio, I hear another version of what I call the "I dones". Time and again, I hear people being interviewed using bad grammar. Nobody seems to notice. Double negatives abound, adjectives are used frequently instead of adverbs. Our friend the Gerund, the good old verbal noun, is long since dead and buried, Lord have mercy on him.
I suspect that most young people reading this won't even know what I'm talking about. Correctly spoken English is becoming a thing of the past. Today's generation seems to have come through an educational system which has neglected parsing and analysis.
Parsing and analysis, remember them? Dreaded they were, but they did teach us about proper syntax. They ensured that there was a verb in every sentence. Subjects were distinguished from objects, adjectives from adverbs, nouns from pronouns. Each word had its place in the sentence and could be safely parsed. Why, in those days we weren't even allowed to split the infinitive (but that was before Star Trek, when men began to boldly go where none had gone before).
I have met honours Leaving Certificate students who don't know what a verb is. I have interviewed graduates from some of our top universities and heard them using the dreaded "I done". The Irish, French and German languages have strict grammatical constructions. These students have to be exact about syntax, so why have they overlooked it in the vernacular?
Recently a college principal and I were discussing this very subject (if you'll pardon the pun). She told me that she had great difficulty today finding teachers educated in the parsing and analysis tradition. My worry now is that if the next generation won't even be taught grammar; where does that leave the language for the future?
Is there anybody out there who agrees with me? Am I the only one who flinches every time she hears another "I done"? Will there be anybody left to flinch after my generation has passed on? Will the gerund too pass on into obscurity?. Oh, woe is me (or is it I?)
Yours, etc.,
Terenure, Dublin 6.