At a training session for EU officials the other day on Better Briefing, I put up a Powerpoint slide asking the following Question:

What is the Supreme Quality in any Brief?

  • Speed
  • Looks at all angles of the problem
  • Clear, reasonable recommendation
  • Readable
  • Accuracy
  • Facts/Opinions/Recommendations kept separate
  • At-a-glance understandable
  • Honesty/integrity

And the answer is …

Accuracy.

Why?

Because all the other noble and important qualities may well be undermined or even turn dangerous if the brief is inaccurate. Acting on a speedy, readable, balanced, persuasive brief which is just wrong may do much more harm than ignoring a slow, convoluted, unpersuasive accurate brief.

So, if there is one thing we need to get hammered into children at an early age it is the technical and operational importance of accuracy.

What do we get instead?

Something like this:

Child A wrote about Pip Davenport, a fairground inventor: If he wasent doing enthing els heel help his uncle Herry at the funfair during the day. And had stoody at nigh on other thing he did was invent new rides…

This received one mark more than Child B who wrote: Quickly, it became apparent that Pip was a fantastic rider: a complete natural. But it was his love of horses that led to a tragic accident. 

Faced by the scandalous collapse of basic spelling created in part by the nationalisation of much of the education system in the UK, Ministers resort to desperate measures. Such as trying to lay down lists of words children of 14 should be able to spell. This is brushed aside by some teachers as ‘control freakery’.

So the decline accelerates. Generations of teachers emerge from schools in which spelling and accuracy have been downplayed or dismissed as an obstacle to ‘creativity’. The teachers themselves see no great reason to insist on the highest standards. They do not know what they are, and/or are unable to reach them themselves! And if the system tries to insist on higher standards of spelling, far too many children will simply fail.

Like dry rot the decline seeps upwards through the system, as more and more people with lower and lower standards move into higher and higher jobs. Until it reaches the heart of the education establishment itself.

Take the case of Jim Knight MP, himself Minister of State for Schools and Learners and graduate of Cambridge University(!). This person has a top-level role in improving education in the UK: Jim Knight’s principal policy areas include raising school standards including public examinations and national tests

His own blog on a website presumably paid for one way or the other by taxpayers’ money has been found to be riddled with spelling errors.

Thus this Minister on a British Legion event:

It also highlights there on going needs and contribution as ex-service men and women … The bands were great, as always the Legion, the military vehicles and particularly good to see some of the serving soldiers over from Bovington.

Has he resigned in shame? Or, failing that, has he been sacked?

Of course not. He can not even get a Parliamentary Question right?

The only conclusion is that the Government is sending the public and above all the nation’s children a loud message that incompetence carries no consequences. A huge step along the general Road to Ruin.

And so the disintegration of the English language proceeds, even in places where one might hope to see a certain forlorn defiance in favour of excellence. See eg this strangled and ungrammatical sentence on the FCO website:

We have a team dedicated to help solve cases of parental child abduction. They will help parent’s whose children have been abducted to liaise with the local authorities, get legal representation and help them with accommodation and travel plans.

Or this:

In the heart of South America we’re involved in two initiatives to predict possible scenarios of unchecked climate change. The aim is to help policy makers of the possible impact global warming can have on agriculture and hydroelectricity.

And this cracker:

Read the latest case studies on our work on low carbon and climate change:

Florida-UK partnership to cut carbon emissions

Predicting the possible – Brazil and South America

Proteccting Asia’s rain forest

Even the link to the Foreign Secretary’s own FCO blog is written ineptly:

FCO Blogger

Find out what The Foreign Secretary views are on climate issues

There is an expression for the death of a language: Linguicide.

See also Ethnocide:

… ethnocide could refer to actions which do not lead directly to death or harm of living members of a group, but instead have the long-term effect of reducing birthrates, interfering with education or transmission of culture to future generations of a group, or erasing the group’s existence or practices from the historical record. This usage is commonly found in discussions of oppressed indigenous peoples and is sometimes referred to as culturecide.

Does not the highlighted expression sum up rather well the officially driven disintegration of the English language seen now over several decades – and in which the English people themselves and their institutions seem to be complicit?

Do we need new words: Suilinguicide and Suiethnocide?