Beginning from today, we are going to examine some aspects of the English Language that people of all classes and social status take for granted.
A large number of people take many aspects of the language for granted because they have come to know and believe that what they know is correct.
Moreover, they hear and see other people, some in very prominent positions, say or write those things. What is more, they are so complacent that they never attempt to find out whether what they say or write is correct, even when they are prompted to the fact that they may be wrong in their use of the language.
Before we get to the details, let me state that a lot of the English we hear every day or see written is incorrect!
On radio, on television, in conversations, in ‘trotros’ and buses, at church, in school, etc we hear all manner of English.
It is up to us, especially students preparing for examinations, to determine which aspects we will imbibe and which we will discard.
We must also know that in grammar, correctness is NOT determined by how well a sentence or expression sounds to the ears.
Some of the worst sentences people make sound so perfect to the ears, while some the best sentences sound so weird to the ears.
Look at this sentence:
Where is the man and the woman?
To the ears, this sentence sounds so perfect. But it is grammatically incorrect because the subject of the sentence, the man and the woman, does not agree with the verb is, which is singular.
The correct sentence should be:
Where are the man and the woman?
But, as you can feel, this does not sound correct to the ears.
Another thing is that when an expression is incorrect, long or frequent use can never make it correct.
Everybody has made one mistake or another at one point or another. But we do ourselves a lot of good if we desist from continuing in our ‘bad’ ways when we see the ‘light’, as it were.
Finally, we must not put so much trust and faith in what others say or write, unless we are so sure of their level in the use of the language.
When we try to copy what somebody says just because we heard it on radio or saw it in the newspapers, it is not the best.
Our favourite radio and television personalities, writers, etc all make mistakes and so we cannot afford to take whatever they say or write hook, line and sinker.
This should make us sit up and, on our own, do something if we want to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Now to the aspects of English people take for granted.
Let’s start with spelling!
Many of us spell words based on how we pronounce those words or hear others pronounce them.
This is very dangerous.
English words are not pronounced the way they are spelt at all, something which makes it very necessary for students to learn how to spell each word on its own and not spell words according to how they are pronounced.
Let us look at the words character, champion and charade. Although all three of them begin with cha, they have different pronunciations.
Moreover, when we hear words such as meagre, chaos, phantom, pneumonia, aquatic, etc. we are tempted to spell them the way they are pronounced, which will lead us to disaster.
The only way out is to be extra curious to check the spelling of every new word we hear, so that if we have to use it, we will know how to spell it.
