Smith and Pinkett hide themselves in cupboard

The general consensus among sensible souls seems to be that we shouldn’t be anal about language and grammar in casual situations, like this for example, but that more care needs to be taken in more formal situations like press releases, newspapers, etc. Fair enough, hey?

So: There was an article in The Star’s Verve section yesterday, a silly little thing about organising romantic getaways with your spouse. Lest we forget, The Star is a popular broadsheet and even its dregs should be edited. However, English was violently assaulted yesterday, as it is most days, in public and through its own mouthpiece. Remember, The Star is an English newspaper.

The article says:

“Smith and Pinkett hide themselves in cupboard and every nook and crane they can find in their house.” And goes on to say, “But for some of us this is impossible: if we tried, not only would the cupboard burst in its seams and fall apart.”

Sadly, that rightly missing apostrophe is just luck. The entire article is a jumble of equally badly expressed things and no doubt the perpetrator will walk away free to do it again. This particular article is a silly example of what is actually a huge problem to do with the sorry state in which communication finds itself, with this culture of laxity in any language. Wake up all you journalists who are supposed to be speaking clearly so that people can listen. Dear Editor: it’s YOUR JOB to see to this, man. The article could so easily have been tweaked to become readable at least, if not particularly interesting.

Yes, this is about English. I cannot comment about other languages since I am embarrassingly monolingual – I can only just get by in Afrikaans since it was forced upon me in school, but it would be foolish of me to try to speak it, never mind write it, in public without a lot of help. I have about twenty words of seSotho, half a dozen of isiZulu, and three of French, none of which I can even spell correctly. So this has to be about English because it’s what I know and what I’m entitled to comment on. Apologies for my poverty, but anyone wanting to take me to task on this will be farting into the wind I’m afraid. Yes, tragic, terrible, sies, all that. But I’d be equally offended to be reading bad (insert favourite language here) if I was (insert favourite cultural group here).

Sometimes you have to laugh instead of cry though. Here’s a laugh. It’s a writing retreat which claims to be “Feeding the marrow of the world with the moss of invisible memories”, and will teach you to see “…the hawk through the eyes of the trembling grass waiting to be murdered by the cow-indigenous listening”.

Eish. Check it out if you’re into nebulous verbiage of the side-splitting kind: http://www.artzone.co.za/scripts/power.dll?subrt=azfndnews&news=12878