Yes, here we are again. Another thread where we commiserate about bad spelling standards. Only this time the world over.
What prompted this thread, was this article:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by The Telegraph UK
Students Shamed with List of Exam Blunders click to show
Students Shamed with List of Exam Blunders
Among the gems from this year's undergraduate exams are an economics student at City University in London student who attributed Northern Rock's downfall to the "laxative enforcement policies".
In literature, a student from Bath Spa University wrote of Margaret Atwood's book: "The Handmaid's Tale shows how patriarchy treats women as escape goats."
A University of Southampton student concerned by global warming wrote that: "Tackling climate change will require an unpresidented response."
And a fellow undergraduate concerned by the threat of diseases, wrote: "Control of infectious diseases is very important in case an academic breaks out."
They have all been entered in the Truer than Intended section of the Times Higher Education's revived "exam howlers" competition.
Phil Baty, deputy editor of the THE, said: "This is simply meant to be a fun snapshot of what students come out with when under pressure, although many of our readers would agree that academic standards of literacy have got a lot worse and there is research suggesting it as well."
Other examples come from students at St Helens College of Art and Design near Liverpool, who were asked to "outline the importance of the four Noble Truths to the Buddhist faith".
One offered the baffling response: "Nirvana cannot be described because there are no words in existence for doing so. Not non-existence either, it is beyond the very ideas of existing and not existing."
Students at the same university were asked to outline the importance of the railway in 19th-century Britain. One wrote: "The railways were invented to bring the Irish from Dublin to Liverpool where they were promptly arrested for being vagrants", while another responded: "The railways were invented to take the weight off the motorways."
A student at the University of the West of England in Bristol astonished his tutor by spelling the subject of one of his favourite topics wrong: "alchol" instead of "alcohol". Another wrote "whom" instead of "womb" in an anatomy paper, and one replaced the word "abdominal" with "abominous".
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The article is humorous and harmless enough. But, it got me thinking about how standards have fallen over the years. I take pride in being quite good at spelling and writing. Both in English and Portuguese.
This also reminded me of a recent occurrence in Portugal, that I think you might find interesting. A few months ago, Portugal signed a treaty whereby over the course of the next few years, most accents and silent consonants in words will be removed from written Portuguese, like acto will turn into ato (act) . All foreign words we use in daily language, such as dossier, atelier, and others, will be turned into portuguese words, like dossiê, or ateliê.
This viscerally upsets me. It's like levelling our language off by the lowest possible standard. Basically this is being done so all other Portuguese speaking countries have an easier time with the language. I am all for promoting harmony, but this is preposterous. I can't recall how many different petitions I have signed against this language treaty.
Well just imagine, it would be like saying now everybody in the world has to write in a particular type of english. And it has to be the simplest version of english you can think of.
I don't mean to discriminate and say that there are better versions of the language than others, but to entirely and unnaturally change the original seems a bit mad.
It seems like instead of teaching people to read and write properly, we're all just slipping into worse versions of the original language. It's lazy and I hate it. I think there is a place for slang, but it's not a substitute for the original language.
What do you think about this?