Demon Drawer's Tangental Thoughts
Created | Updated Aug 26, 2004
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Demon Drawer's Tangenatal
Thoughts, or D2T2 for short. For a while know I've realised that my brain goes off on quite
obscure tangents at times and so I thought I'd start to share that with you dear reader of The
Post. I do not promise that I will go off on a tangent every week but if I do The Post Team will be
the first to know.
This weeks tangent:
Yellow Avian Kills Queen's Tongue
Working in a call centre I have to take details from a variety of people for a variety of purposes. To aid us in getting such information we obviously use the international phonetic alphabet from Alpha to Zulu. However, there are times I think people should be forced to take an ear test before being
allowed to dial up for anybody's service.
When you say S for Sierra and clarify it by saying S for sugar as the starting number for one of the codes I require. Why do people start F? Are we that illiterate that people are looking for Fugar on the shelf of Fainfburyff or Teffco? Is the GSCE curriculum now teaching Olde English rather than modern?
Customers can also at times seem incapable of following the simplest of instructions. They do not seem able to determine top from bottom. They miss out key words in what you say and do not sometimes even give you a chance to answer their myriad of questions that they rattle off to you.
However there is also a far more worrying trend in the English language, that is English not American version. We already have some letters which rhyme B,C, D, E, G, P, T and V so why oh why has Z, pronounced in Britain Zed suddenly becoming Zee. Are Big Bird and his cohorts on 'Sesame Street' becoming the only teachers of letters to our British children these days?
You may feel this is idle rant. However, in this year's higher level English exam not one failure was recorded across the whole of Scotland! You may think good, but the reason for this 'excellent' result is schools encouraging less-able pupils taking a lower level or not taking English at
all. This used to deemed one of two compulsory Highers for Scots to attempt.
On top of the dumbing down of those taking the exam, the exams themselves are dumbed down. This is evident in the written correspondence I have dealt with these last few weeks. Letter writing used to be part of the 'O' Level English that I, as well as some of the older hootoo researchers, took but
no more. This is evident in reading letters of complaint from customers. Letters lack structure, are riddled with grammatical errors and as for spelling that has gone totally out of the window. I'm sure that if any of you deal in correspondence you will know that too.
So returning on a tangent to this weeks point I feel a big yellow bird and the 'Children's' Television Network' are great, but also slowly but surely eradicating the Queen's English.
This week's tangent was brought to you by the letter S and the number 42. No I said S Sierra not F for Foxtrot!
