BEACHCOMBER

103 YEARS OLD AND STILL PERSONALLY APPROACHABLE...

HAVE you noticed how many interviewees on the TV or radio news these days will start their response with the words, “Er, well, I mean...”?

Why does the interviewer not immediately interrupt? “Excuse me for butting in,” they might start, “but you haven’t said anything yet, so you cannot logically be explaining what you mean. Unless you intend to explain what you mean by, ‘Er well’, which is meaningless anyway.”

“Er, well, I mean,” is one of the many linguistic foibles and solecisms that we hear too much. “I was just so took in,” said a lady referring to her being misled, while a footballer who had been involved in a bit of a fracas said: “I should’ve bit my tongue.”

Both speakers clearly had problems with past participles. “Taken” and “bitten” were the words they needed. It would have benefited both if someone had explained the difference between the simple past tense and the past perfect.

As for, “Me and Kirsty went to sort out costumes”, the interviewer should not have bitten his tongue but explained that we say, “Kirsty and I”, when they are the subject of a verb and,

“Kirsty and me”, when they are the object or following a preposition. Another example came in a recent interview with a Labour leadership candidate. Talking of her childhood, she recalled sitting at the top of the stairs when her father returned from work when she used to, “listen to what him and me mum were talking about”.

The speaker would surely have been grateful if the interviewer had told her that her parents, in that sentence, were not the object of the verb “listen to”, but the subject of “were talking about”, so it should be “mum and he”; and while we’re on the subject, it is “my mum”, not “me mum”.

The same speaker, later in the interview, when talking about Brexit policy, talked of, “making sure we were taking no-deal off the table and we took our eye off the ball”. This is surely a mixed metaphor. How can one take no-deal off the table while keeping one’s eye on the ball?

Precision of language reflects precision of thought of which we have far too little. I therefore call for a Day of Linguistic Rectitude once a month in which we all adopt a zero tolerance approach to errors.