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Sir - Listening to people on television being interviewed, I find to my horror that the word "vouchsafed" has been replaced by "said".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

goofy said...

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

Brett said...

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

Anonymous said...

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

Brett said...

It would be nice if that were the case.