It had to happen, I suppose, and it did. But it still left me shaken. Yet there it was, slap on the front page of the London Times: the state of Britain’s public finances “may mitigate against further investment of British blood and money” in Afghanistan.
A good thing too, in my view. But mitigate against? Merciful heaven, this is the sort of crass error that educated Britons (Times journalists, for example) used to deride as the semi-literacy of the semi-educated. If, like me, you’re one of those people who habitually whisper to themselves the words they’re about to write, some quirk of the brain makes it possible to write right when you mean write, or seen for scene. I know, because I’ve done it. But I can’t find any such excuse for mitigate in place of militate. There must be some writer on The Times who genuinely thinks mitigate is the right word in the passage I’ve cited. Yes, and some sub-editor who let it pass (or put it in) — presumably on into the very last edition of the night, since a week later it was still there in the paper’s online version.
And this in the newspaper which, in its heyday, could fairly claim to be the grandest in the English-speaking world (and which today is busy organizing competitive ‘spelling bees’ for schools across the country so the kids can show they know propah English, nah).
And there I come belatedly to my point, which isn’t to be rude about The Times. I doubt that any reader of the Calcutta Telegraph was thrown by my mis-spelling of proper, to reproduce what Britons like to mock as the “cut-glass” pronunciation of the well-bred. I should think most Telegraph readers could guess, if they didn’t know, that nah is a colloquial word, from a much lower grade of British English, meaning roughly indeed or yes, really. To put the two together in one sentence is pretty daft, unless you’re being satirical. Yet even in West Bengal, as in Britain, the result surely must have been understandable.
And there we come to one of the most heated questions about modern English: so long as the result is understandable, does it matter if language is used incorrectly? Do we need “standard English” at all? Google the word sociolinguistics (“the study of language in relation to its sociocultural context”) plus, for example, the name of Professor John Honey, and you’ll meet some ferocious inter-academic slanging, the sort you’d sooner expect when one brand of Trotskyite is airing his views on another.
I think correct English matters, and not just because employers like to think so too, or at least to imagine or claim that they do. I’m not quite so sure about spelling, and recently raised some hackles by saying so (for pity’s sake, what are hackles? Answer: the hairs on a dog’s back that stick up when it’s angry, but that doesn’t matter a damn, so long as you’re using the metaphor correctly and not, for example, writing roused some hackles or wrung some hackles). I’m not even so sure what I mean by “correct”; certainly less sure than Mr Honey is, though I lean his way. But yes, it matters.
I can’t go into all this now: it would take megabytes. But I’ll be back to the issue — though less lengthily, I hope, and no doubt The Telegraph’s sub- editors do, than that.
