Roslyn Petelin is an associate professor at The University of Queensland and a staunch defender of proper grammar and style, saying that she's a "happy snob" and doesn't mind copping a bit of flak for being a language pedant.
She has written several books on how to communicate properly.
Photo: Lorenzo Cafaro by Pixaaby
Petelin tells Jim Mora mispronunciations, malapropisms, and some of her pet language peeves proliferate today and the main reason is a lack of standards among educationalists.
She describes her books and courses as defences of language pedantry and the need to protect linguistic meaning in discourse.
“A malapropism is using a real word wrongly, but to call it a malapropism it has to have some comic effect. We can go right back to Shakespeare and Much To Do About Nothing, where Officer Dogberry says ‘Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons’. So, you have two malapropisms there.”
Mispronunciation of words has become widespread, people saying words such as ‘expresso’ instead of espresso constantly.
Americanisms are also ubiquitous and some in particular grate on Petelin.
Roslyn Petelin Photo: Supplied
“There are two Americanisms that really annoy me. They talked about a person having ‘passed’ and we would say ‘passed away’. Another one I’ve noticed, they will say ‘a couple eggs’ instead of a ‘couple of eggs’. They leave out the ‘of’ – I’ve no idea how long that’s been around.”
What has been around for some time is the phrase ‘yous’ instead of ‘you’.
Petelin concedes that language morphs and is in some ways fluid, with linguistic meaning and nuance changing as society evolves. But there are limits to this, she says.
What concerns her most is upholding standards of language use, spoken and written with precision.
“I think young people who are taught by people who don’t have the same standards is probably the problem, rather than what people say that, ‘well, everybody’s texting and using emojis, etc, and not revering the written or spoken word the way they used to'. But, I blame the education system,” she says.
She has been running an online course for six years now to improve grammar, which offers several prescriptive methods for doing so.
“I’ve had 800,000 students enrolling. At the moment, I’ve got a course that is running for the 15th time and I’ve got 50,000 students in it, and if they weren’t happy and wanting to elevate themselves by using correct English this course would not be so popular.
“A lot of them have English as a second language. There are something like 182 countries or territories that they come from and it’s to enhance the quality of writing and speaking. There are videos that I made, and some of my postgraduate students made, and I think they set a pretty good example.”
Social snobbery isn’t what drives this quest for high standards – in the end, good language skills bring better and more precise linguistic meaning and an ability to live a more meaningful life with more rich interactions with people.
“If we had standards and we keep up those standards, and we don’t accept sloppy writing and speaking, we’ve got more chance of being understood.”
