Kerre Woodham: A plea for precision

From time to time, English language reformers pop their heads above the parapets and take yet another potshot at the world's lingua franca. It's inconsistent, they say. Too many vowels in odd places.

They point to the numbers of children having trouble reading and blame the language rather than sub-standard teachers, woefully inadequate parents or apathetic kids who just don't want to read.

English is too hard to learn, these anarchists say with a plaintive whine. Let's make it easier. I know I'm going to sound like Garth George in a frock - but it's precisely this sort of namby pamby attitude that has contributed to our social and moral malaise. If things are too hard, they're modified or chucked out altogether.

Had this half-arsed, flabby mediocrity prevailed throughout the centuries, explorers would never have found new lands, mountains would never have been scaled, and we would never compete with Australia in anything. If something is difficult to achieve, generally it's worthwhile attaining.

So what if English has its idiosyncrasies? All languages do. What about the feminine "windows" and masculine "pens" in French? What's that all about?

Learning any language is complex and difficult and occasionally frustrating, but it's precisely because of the quirks that it's so interesting. Learning English opens you up to Latin, Greek and French and many different epochs in history. No, any call to lose the "e" off "have", or spell "treat" as "treet" will generate a call to arms from English pedants everywhere. The reason "e" is on "have" is because without it, the word looks truncated and just plain odd. "Hav" looks like an old lady in a mini dress. Technically, it's permissible, but realistically, it's wrong. And the reason we have an "a" in "treat" is because we're supposed to swallow the "e" a little. If we want to sound like our Australian cousins, lengthen that "e". But it's not the way the word is meant to sound.

We English-lovers are also assaulted daily by nasty grammatical errors. Apostrophes litter words like dandruff on shoulders. There is neither rhyme nor reason for their distribution - they just fall where they land.

The repainted Bushells sign on the dairy in Freemans Bay is a prime example. The repainting of this famous local landmark was apparently "solely funded by the Rupa's".

Every day I pass this sign while driving to work, and every day, as I wait at the lights, this misplaced apostrophe smacks me between the eyes, and every time it does, it smarts. I'm sure you have your own examples. But consider the numbers of people who have to be totally ignorant of the fundamentals of grammar to allow these errors to slip through. The person who wrote the copy, the person who signed off on the sign, the signwriters themselves - it's very disturbing for we anally retentive, apostrophe-loving individuals.

I know, I know - there are a million other issues with which we should be concerned.

I appreciate that. But Lynne Truss' book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the English pedant's bible, wouldn't have sold millions of copies worldwide unless people cared deeply about the protection of the English language. So I know I'm not alone. I love words. I love learning new ones - their derivation, how they sound and how they look. And I'm all for evolution of the language.

By all means, add new words and adapt the language to suit the culture. Texting is a whole other language, and so that's fine. The language of the street as heard in rap music and spelled out in graffiti - that too is OK. "OK" is OK.

But for heaven's sake, don't change English on the basis that it's hard.

To do that would only hasten the fall of civilisation.