LifeZamaZing

Last week a representative of one of the “known” institutes of our city for English Speaking and Communication approached our school. They wanted to address our students about how they can bring about fluency in spoken English. The representative however was not very convincing and moreover, we had exams approaching at that point of time. Hence, I just postponed her hopes and asked her to see me next month. She left a brochure about her institute on my desk before leaving.

The brochure was three-printed-pages stapled up neatly. Somehow luck had it and I was not all that busy that day. To kill time, I started reading through the brochure. And to my dismay and surprise and shock the first paragraph I read had a couple of spelling mistakes. Now the thing with me is, I have got into a habit of playing a spell-checker. I mean, my husband Abhi, uses my language skills in turn for all his computer skills that I use.  So after many years of proof-reading and knowing common errors, I now just glance through to pick out most spelling and grammar mistakes.

Well, but that apart, coming down to our “spoken english institute”. I read further only for the evil pleasure of finding their errors and feeling good about how well we work in their comparison!!

And trust me, the brochure provided enough fun. The entire piece had almost 20 into-the-eye grammar and spelling mistakes like, ‘century‘ was spelled as ‘centuary‘, ‘synonyms‘ was used to mean ‘synonymous‘, ‘etiquette’ had acquired a plural form and was ‘etiquettes‘ (you see if we can have ‘manners’ why can’t we have ‘etiquettes‘??!!), ‘modal‘- the grammar term was spelled ‘model‘ to mean what I really don’t know.

But the crown undoubtedly goes to ‘mam‘. ‘Mam‘- don’t you understand? Well, it is the most common way of spelling ‘ma’am‘ or ‘madam‘!! I am used to ‘mam‘ coming from students but that coming from the brochure of a place that claims to train students in English Language and provide coaching for IELTS and TOEFL?? Now that is what is shocking.

I had a nice time dissecting the brochure and I felt like calling up the representative and humiliating her for being so careless but then I thought better and put it aside. But my mind just doesn’t seem to put it aside. I truly can’t understand how can such phony, filmy institutes claim to teach English?  I mean it hurts. People pay up huge amounts to learn the language assuming it will brighten their job prospects and this is what they learn?? Then they approach schools and seek jobs as teachers!! GREAT so the wrongly learned language continues for God knows how many generations! We now have such a lot of wrong language that the tougher job students face is not learning the language but unlearning the wrong language!

And thanks to mobile, sms and the bollywood it is hard to actually tell, what is correct English and what is not. I am not a die-hard grammar-fanatic but I do like langauge that makes sense. So now we are in an era that not just imbibed Hinglish (Hindi + English) but is heading for Jumblish (Jumbled English). Where each word will mean different to each individual and teachers won’t deduct marks for wrong spelling because you see there will be no right spellings!!

Ahem!!

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