Toys Aren't Us

Whenever I catch sight of the store name Toys ‘R’ Us, my blood pressure rises exponentially.

In the title, the R is placed backwards. I get the joke: that it could be how a child learning to write might incorrectly record it but it annoys me because it’s wrong. It’s not cute for a multi-national company to write its R backwards. I’m also irritated because I suppose they mean ‘Toys Are Us’ which isn’t grammatically correct. They mean ‘We Are Toys’ but that isn’t gimmicky enough. All of this is especially frustrating because the majority of its customers have children in tow.

A friend of mine in the UK told me that her daughter’s English report was not very good last term. When she’d finally got time to look in detail at the report it was the school holidays so she couldn’t speak to a member of school staff. She told me that she went to her daughter’s room and managed to find a couple of English homework books and that she was shocked by what she found. The content was good in that her daughter was not inhibited about expressing her thoughts and ideas on paper but the spelling was awful. Simple but silly mistakes like a small ‘i’ for the personal pronoun; confusion between were and where; your and you’re; lack of capital letters for obvious proper nouns. What was particularly shocking was that none of the mistakes in the workbook had been corrected by the teacher. Do the schools not realize that pupils will not miraculously learn to write in formal English unless they are taught the difference?

It’s not really surprising though, when looking through a few magazines at random, I found grammatical errors of the ‘them’ for ‘those’, ‘can’ for ‘may’ and ‘of’ for ‘have’ level. As for the vocabulary, at its best it’s slang and at its worst it’s positively indecent. Why do so many people - and the influential organizations to which they belong – insist on dumbing down the English Language?

Ken Smith, Criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, states in an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement that he’s fed up with correcting students’ spelling mistakes, and recommends the most common errors people make should be accepted as variant spellings. (Variant spellings usually apply to distinctions between US vs UK or US vs Commonwealth spellings, such as donut/doughnut or color/colour.) Ken Smith’s employer is the same University that has a website to attract 11-16 year olds into higher education called: becozucan.org.uk.

Of course gimmicks and errors aside, language isn’t static. You don’t need much knowledge of Thai to notice that language is a developing concept: ‘computer’ and ‘email’ appear regularly in the speech of modern Thais. In 1747 Dr Johnson, wrote of his intent to write a dictionary ‘by which pronunciation of our language may be fixed’ and ‘its purity preserved.’ On completion some ten years later, he acknowledged a dictionary does not stop the development of language.

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, does record its change with the acceptance of new words. OED’s Reading Programme employs in the region of fifty readers to look at all kinds of contemporary publications: novels, scripts, lyrics, newspapers and magazines. The findings of the Reading Programme, Incomings, are stored in an electronic database of quotation material. OED looks beyond the Incomings database and states: ‘A rule of thumb is that any word can be included [in the dictionary] which appears five times, in five different printed sources, over a period of five years.”

So this is my advice: just because you’re a mzee, don’t be a twonk. Get your ample bahookie off the chair and go and start using our rich and evocative language: you’ll soon find yourself crunk about the lingo.