Do you know that there is a company referred to as the Queen’s English Society?

No? Nor did I, till at the moment.

On its web site, it shouts out its key message – in capital letters (however gents should not shout, so I will not inflict them on you): “Good English issues – the world makes use of it – we should maintain it protected from declining requirements.”

The Queen’s English Society was established about 40 years in the past, nevertheless it has now introduced (June 2010) its plans to arrange The Academy of English, an English model of the French Academie francaise, geared toward protecting the language pure.

The academy needs to “set an accepted commonplace of excellent English” in our “hectic, fashionable, digitalised world.” It might defend the Queen’s English from alien impurities, bastardizations and text-speak horrors.

A London Occasions report offers an perception into the mentality of the founding father of the academy, Martin Estinel; he stated he nonetheless used the phrase ‘homosexual’ to imply ‘comfortable’ however “grudgingly accepted that its newer definition was now within the dictionary 튜나편입.”

Thousands and thousands of issues

There are tens of millions of issues about this plan. One is that English is spoken by fairly a variety of folks, who aren’t, by the way, topics of the lady of German origin who sits on the throne of England, corresponding to greater than 250 million People, 79 million Nigerians, and 49 million Filipinos.

It additionally occurs to be a near-universal language, spoken by tens of millions extra as a second language.

Of their use of the time period ‘the Queen’s English,’ the folks behind the academy appear to assume that English is owned in a roundabout way by a feudal relic who guidelines over a small nook of the English-speaking world (and who in all probability nonetheless believes in ‘the divine proper of kings’). Not any extra, chaps.

As for these tens of millions of American linguistic vandals, they and their forebears have been refusing to talk the Queen’s English and doing their very own unbiased factor now for a number of centuries (for Pete’s sake, they cannot even spell ‘color’).

Appalling grammatical crimes

No, the brand new academy will not even have the ability to management the tongues of nearly all of English folks, who refuse to ‘communicate correct’ (in spite of everything, the BBC has to maintain them off the airwaves in case they offend well mannered folks). They will go on committing appalling grammatical and syntactical crimes in unusual native accents.

Ah properly, possibly English will survive. In any case, it is a uniquely wealthy language because of the truth that it is actually two languages – a Germanic basis vastly enriched by the French throughout the century or two once they dominated England. After which there are all these added riches absorbed throughout the centuries that English wandered world wide.

English will go on rising and altering and surviving linguistic crimes because it continues to spead – and Mr Estinel goes to be very ungay when he realizes that there is nothing he can do about it.