Does English need a body to rule what is correct and what not, like the Académie française? I doubt it. But a group called the Queen’s English Society thinks so, and has launched its “English Academy”. A newspaper report of this moved readers to derision. Unjustly, I’d say. The idea may be wrong in principle, and anyway doomed to failure: even highly literate Frenchmen spatter their talk with ‘Franglais’, slang words and worse grammar. But it’s not absurd. My own doubts, based on an accompanying article from the QES’s acting chairman, were of a different sort.

She lamented, inter alia, that “people don’t seem to know about tenses any more... We hear we was a lot.” So we do, though not only recently: we wuz robbed entered print after a boxing match in 1932. But if the lady really thinks this error has anything to do with tenses, she am talking through her hat: we is would be just as wrong. The error is solely one of the misconjugation of the verb to be. Could she really think so? Had the paper maybe summarized a phone call and stuck her byline on its text? No, a QES spokesman told me sharply: “She’s capable of writing”, the views were indeed hers.

If so, I began to wonder, what qualifications has the QES to instruct the rest of us? Certainly not modesty. “The QES aims to establish itself as an authoritative regulator and reference for the English language,” says its website. And already its Academy “constitutes a site that no-one can afford to ignore and which everyone needs to draw upon.” Indeed? Roll over, you heirs of Shakespeare and Dickens, from now on you need help from a body that seemingly can’t tell its tenses from its toenails.

OK, that’s not fair: its website — almost all that its “academy” now amounts to — offers lots of sound advice. Sound, but always backward-looking. The QES thinks useful Ms a “fad” word. It ticks off the mother who tells the kid You can only eat three cakes. She must say You can eat only three cakes. True in pedantry, false of real English. There’s worse than that. If a name ends in s, for of James (eg), should one write James’ or James’s? “It seems to be a matter of taste.” Indeed if the next words are, say, serious suspicions, full of s-sounds, the QES thinks James’ definitely right. Nonsense. Only the -s’s form is correct, period (except in Jesus’ and for some ancient names).

As for style, choose between Footballers make a lot of money, but the best-known ones make the most and Footballers are well remunerated, but especially so the better-known among them. The QES thinks the second version “so much more elegant”. Remunerated? George Orwell must be turning in his grave.

And the QES is to teach us all English? Mind you, we need that, don’t we? Without “specialist training in English”, even highly educated folk may be brilliant in their own fields, “but heaven help them (or us) if they have to set their wisdom down in writing or deliver a speech... They frequently say what they do not mean...” etc. As a reporter, I read, heard or interviewed hundreds of such people. This tosh was true of maybe one in fifty.

And if English is not their country’s native tongue, or at least an official or nationwide one, “they” — the QES plainly means a German — “will proudly tell you that ‘I heff for six muns English in Bournmaous studied and vos topp off mine class. Don’t vurry viz zee interpreter, mine English is poerfekt.’” And nothing will convince them otherwise. The QES Academy could certainly help them — “if only they were not so arrogant.” Arrogant? Now who’s talking? Many Germans in fact speak fluent English; I’ve never met one who thought his was perfect.

Does the QES even practise what it preaches? Study this. We are hoping to put the QES on the screens and in the minds of thousands, if not millions of people... “We really do have something to be proud of, in our Society and it’s well worth shouting about” said the QES webmaster. Our ‘subject’ and indeed our stated aims, to halt the decline in standards in the use of English, is probably viewed by many if not most people, as being dry, academic... The knowledge that within these pages, is the first English Academy and that it is freely accessible to all, is quite astonishing, despite the fact that we are several centuries behind the Florentines, the Spanish and the French, in setting up such an entity.”

That puff includes one typo (aims), one missing quote mark, three missing commas, five superfluous ones and a final sentence as muddled in sense as in verbiage and punctuation. And these folk aspire to regulate our language! It is indeed much misused. An academy might help, though god knows how it would handle American, Indian and other Englishes. But not, please, a self-appointed bunch of conceited, sneery nostalgics, ever ready to mock other people’s errors, but quite capable of their own. As we are all — but not many of us claim to be an “academy”.