Modern usages of English

Below is my blog placed in The Star's Online Blog (Citizen's Blog)

Modern usages of English

Posted by: Kengt_Penang, 18-Aug-2006

The Government has been encouraging the learning and mastering of English as can be seen from many media reports.



Newspapers are doing their part in such efforts.



Steps are being taken to incorporate the learning of English even in the curriculum of kindergartens.



These are concerted efforts in trying to raise the standard of English of the people in realizing that mastering English will do everybody and the nation good.



In the midst of all these, there is a discernible trend advocating modern usages of English which are incompatible or against grammatical rules; and below are some of the examples:-



A car owner should take good care of their vehicle. (This sentence which is taken from the Mind Our English Section of the STAR of August 4, has a noun-pronoun disagreement.)


The relative pronoun "that" which is reserved for nonhuman antecedents, is also often found with human ones. (Such usage is seen in the Article headlined "Relatively speaking" in STARTWO of June 23 and mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_relative_clauses.)


"Due to" and "owing to" can be used interchangeably (as mentioned in http://www.thefreedictionary.com/due+to and http://www2.bartleby.com/68/75/2075.html which state that "due to" and "owing to" are compound prepositions against what I was taught in the sixties : the former being an adjectival phrase while the latter an adverbial phrase; and it is also stated in The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Fifth Edition) that the sentence, "I came late due to an accident" is incorrect.)


These usages have drawn objections from some critics and grammarians.



It is interesting to determine whether such modern usages have made the learning and mastering of English any easier or have made easier the job of English teachers and examiners marking English papers.



Comments:

General-Kengt,the examples you highlighted just go to show how far deteriorated the state of English in this country is. Some things are mired too deep in the mud, and with this one I suspect it'll take a catastrophe to happen before misplaced hubris for a certain dialect is seen for what it is - absolute folly!
By Pyroblitzer, 18-Aug-2006