The television program listing magazine ‘What’s on TV‘, has in its description of tonight’s ITV1’s 9.00pm program ‘Northanger Abbey‘, quote “ A naïve young clergyman’s daughter . . .”. We could ask how young is the clergyman and why is he judged to be naïve? In reality the clergyman is neither young nor naïve! It’s is his daughter who is young and naive. This unfortunately is a typical example of present day sloppy writing.
OK, people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones - my blogs are not so much peppered with bad spelling and poor grammar as splattered with them. My excuse is dyslexia. What is the excuse of the ‘What’s on TV’ writer and its Editor?
Dyslexia and the way it manifests itself is very interesting. In my case my brain refuses to acknowledge the existence of certain words. (The following sentence is going to be difficult to type, because it contains those no no words). “I thing throw traing I can over come dyslexia.” . My brain always confuses throw & through and think & thing. The trouble is spellcheck doesn’t pickup the error, unlike with “traing”. My brain detects patterns in words, and decides, it can save time by dropping letters. Just typing the last sentence it deleted a ’t’ in patterns and a ’p’ in dropping. And on every occasion (just then it had a problem - should it be double ’c’ or ‘s’?), training comes out as traing - why bother with the second ’in’!
The old brain is easily confused. Walking through Westminster, I always question the origin of the street name 'Old Pye Street'. Is the street old or was it named after an old pye? And what or who was pye? Was there a Mr Pye or is it an example of a dyslexic sign writer and it was meant to be pie? But what was so important about an old pork pie that it has a street named after it? Or was it a steak and kidney pie? Yet again there could have been a Mr Pye. But I still don’t now if the pye or street is old.
