Queen’s English Society attempts to save English from horrors of ‘text-speak’
By ANIMonday, June 7, 2010
LONDON - The Queen’s English Society is forming an Academy of English to protect the purity of the language.
The members of the society hope the academy will hinder text-speak from corrupting English language.
Similar institutions are running in other countries. France has L’Acad�mie Fran�aise, Spain the Real Academia Espa�ola, and Italy the Accademia della Crusca.
The society said: “Other languages, French and Spanish for example, have supreme authorities that try, while moving with the times, to define what is good and acceptable usage and what is not. They do not stop the language from changing over the years, but they do provide a measure of linguistic discipline and try to retain valid and useful new terms, while rejecting passing fads.
“English has never had any such academy. The 21st century is a bit late to start one … but precisely because our language is so widespread - and also because there has been a dreadful devaluation and deterioration of education in our hectic, modern, digitalised world - we do desperately need some form of moderating body to set an accepted standard of good English.”
The academy’s website (queens-english-society.com) has dictionaries, points of grammar, comparisons between UK and US English, and a section for other English-speaking communities.
It also includes a section on the “tragic failure of the British education system (and the teachers that it produces) to meet the needs of our children”.
“At the moment, anything goes. Let’s set down a clear standard of what is good, correct, proper English. Let’s have a body to sit in judgment,” the Times quoted Martin Estinel, 71, the founder of the academy, as saying.
He said that he still uses words for their original meanings, the word “gay” to mean “happy”.e added: “Some other words are fads that die out. People misplace stress within a sentence. All these things are going haywire in the language. I would love the academy to have a Royal Charter.” (ANI)
