Saturday, April 12, 2008

Declining standards of language

By Craig Brown
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/04/2008

Sir - Listening to people on television being interviewed, I find to my horror that the word "vouchsafed" has been replaced by "said".
AB, Berks

Sir - Further to your previous letter, I have noticed that, when employing the word "said', people on television insist on pronouncing it "sed". Can nothing be done?
CD, Bray

Sir - And the very same people call themselves "peep-ul" rather than pronouncing the word as it should be pronounced, ie "pee-O-ple". Has the world ever been so slovenly?
EF, Barking

Sir - I have noticed that people no longer bother to pronounce "sausage" correctly. I was always brought up to enunciate each vowel separately, and to give it a hard "g". A properly pronounced sentence employing the word in question would go "Please may I have another "s-ah-oo-sagg-e", mother?"
GH, Ham


Read the rest here.

4 comments:

  1. too bad so many of the comments completely missed the point.

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  2. Yes, it makes you kind of wonder whether they actually read it at all.

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  3. Anonymous8:24 AM

    I thought the comments were actually a tongue-in-cheek extension of the column.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It would be nice if that were the case.

    ReplyDelete