Iken sbel guid nau

If you can read the above, then you both have a good imagination & are proof that most people ‘read’ by recognising words & phrases, rather than actually seeing the letters & putting them together like a five-year-old. This is testimony to the human brain’s pattern-matching & leaps of intuition.

However, & I cannot stress this enough, what have I actually said in the title? Did I intend what you read, or did I instead intend to convey meaningless goobledegook that you have interpreted in your own special way as something else entirely. Have you invested meaning that wasn’t there?

Just as an aside, I built the above from slurring & the ‘spelling’ of a schwa, Dutch spelling conventions, Scots, & a more German style of spelling that is quite rare in English. Grammar aside, this kind of hodge-podge is tantamount to the norm as ESL spreads & turns common English more into common pidgin. More people using English will spell things ‘the way they are used to’ in their native tongue, based on their pronunciation, or (in)ability to differentiate vowel sounds, or confusion between homonyms, etc.

This is the way the world is. Bemoaning the demise of the English language in its pure form does nothing unless there is a concerted effort to teach those who learn a version of English (dialect) what the regional differences are. There is no Queen’s English. There is RP (received pronunciation), (once) used as a guide for BBC announcers, which is well past its use-by date. There is the Oxford Dictionary - an essential tome if you happen to be a scholar at that fine institution. There is reality. Strangely, these things don’t all come together.

L’Académie française does an excellent job just by existing. Forget what it achieves. It stands for something, & at least written French can be compared from around the world & adjudged. There are other languages that have academies, some modelled on the French. There is no equivalent in English - the closest being the Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch. For that matter, as English becomes the lingua franca (if you’ll pardon the odd incursion of yet another unrelated language), by definition it becomes a distinct language, somehow different from that which ‘native’ English speakers learn from birth.

My audience has just gotten a lot smaller. I had been directing my thoughts at those who want to write better English, & I had always had in mind those who write in English as the language I had learnt. The majority - in fact such a large percentage of the world that it baffles the mind - have no real interest in grammar or spelling, only in getting their message across in what will always be to them a foreign tongue.

Until I accept that this non-English commonly in use is also a foreign tongue to me, then my audience is about as wide as that of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. I didn’t even know that existed, but I suspected it would …