Watch your language in this doggie-dog world

Feel like the village idiom? It’s time to give up the goat.

A young friend at the paper recently observed of some politician’s ludicrous thought bubble, “If he thinks that, he’s got another thing coming”.

I politely pointed out that the expression is “another think coming”, only to discover that my intervention condemned me as an orthographic, semantic and syntactic dinosaur. So it’s time to put that right, shake off the shackles of orthodoxy and join the new linguistic free-for-all.*

It was alarming, when we poured over the big dictionary, to find that change had past me by, and that for all intensive purposes my version had been supplanted by the misheard and, to my delicate ears, illogical “thing”.

It never seizes to amaze me how often supposably intelligent people make this kind of flagrant mistake, but heedless to say (as someone who’s never been adverse to offering my opinion, sort after or not), appraising them of their errors goes down like a damp squid.

Irregardless, the discussion peaked my curiosity, and wet my appetite for more. I don’t mean to infer that I possess any superior knowledge, and the iconoclast in me instinctively welcomes a flaunting of the rules, but I’ve always flattered myself that I had a decent grasp of the tenants of English usage.

I fancied it was my strong suite, and could go on about it at nauseam, albeit to little affect.

While we may not object to change per say, do we really want to give free reign to this abuse of language? Must we grin and bare it as we watch our noble – and somewhat unique – tongue stray into unchartered territory, decay into just another pigeon? It literally begs the question: is this borne of ignorance, or disinterest?

But when I began to canvas the views of other colleagues, I learnt I’m not the font of wisdom I imagined. Where I once looked in the mirror and saw the splitting image of Shakespeare, or at least Enid Blyton, now I see a boar pedalling the penultimate in arrogance, trying to proscribe to his fellows how they should speak.

A bit of discrete self-depreciation is in order. For in the mist of all the madness in the world, we should be reticent to heave scorn on people over an issue of limited importance, no matter the passions it might illicit.

It’s a mute point, of course; we all make mistakes, and few dare say we are beyond approach, or that our grammar always passes mustard. How rude to hone in on someone’s faults and turn them into some kind of escape goat for your own deep-seeded prejudices.

So I resolved as a matter of principal to change tact, bunker down and try to diffuse the situation. The battle is lost, anyway; we Jurassic remnants squandered our guilt-edged chances to defend the old ways, watched them flounder on the rocks of neglect as later generations, swift as lightening, administered the coup de gras.

It’s been a hard road to hoe, but there’s no future in being a sore looser. It’s a doggie-dog world, after all, and only the foolhearty would overestimate the will of the populous. Better to give up the goat and admit defeat, rather than skunk off in high dungeon.

“Here, here,” younger readers will cry, “hosted on his own petard, the know-all finally gets his just desserts!” (I don’t normally use explanation marks, but here it seems appropriate.)

So without further adieu, let me overcome my post-dramatic stress, uncurl myself from the feeble position on my chaise lounge, cry with the hoards “Vail, standard English!”, and start to tow the line. If everyone else thinks it makes perfect scents, who am I to say it stinks?

*A point for each incidence of success, up to a possible 80. And remember, as Samuel Johnson reputedly said, “a man who would make a pun would pick a pocket”.