I’ll admit I’m a linguistic reactionary. It was all downhill after Webster’s gave the nod to spell “supersede” as “supercede.” After that, the next thing you knew, glossy magazines and Ivy League alums were repeating the nonsensical malapropism “hone in” (sharpen inward?) instead of “home in” (derived from homing pigeons, which seek a known destination). Cats and dogs lay down together, and the rest is history.
But is even the most basic grammar now becoming a lost art among public schoolteachers?
At least weekly, we must correct the “corrections” of certain of our daughter’s teachers.
For example, her summer writing teacher — a UC Irvine instructor — corrected “philosophocal” to “philisophical.” This week, the teacher’s assistant tackled a run-on sentence by simply cleaving it with a period, so that the second “sentence,” now a fragment, began with “but” and a comma — introducing three errors in a single change.
We live in a purportedly top public school district. Either we are misinformed on that point, or the situation is worse elsewhere.
