Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Monday 14 June 2010

QES Demolition Derby

I don't usually make posts that just link to other people's blogs but I'm going to make an exception. I was intending to write my own demolition of the arrant nonsense that forms the bulk of the Queen's English Society website but my minimal research has revealed that others have already done a fairly thorough job.

So here are some of them.

We can only hope, as Plain Text suggests, that the whole thing is a spoof. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that it isn't.

5 comments:

Stan (at Sentence first) said...

Thanks for the link, Bob. At least two members of the QES have responded to my blog post, including the founder of their absurd English academy, so I'm quite sure the Society isn't a spoof. In fact, they appear to have been around for a few decades, grumbling about non-standard usage as though it augured the end of civilised society.

Bob Hale said...

I thought you did a very good job in your post about them. I suppose it's really quite funny that they show such a weak grasp of how the language works.

I especially liked the fact that one of their examples under "subjunctive" is a first conditional that no one in his right mind would make a subjunctive. Would anybody ever say this?

"Although he come every day, I do not see him."

Anyway, I've now added your site to my ever-growing list of language blog feeds.

Stan said...

Would anybody ever say this?

I can think of one person. Thanks for subscribing, and for your kind words. I've updated my post to link to yours and some others. Yes, it is quite funny, in a mildly horrifying sort of way.

Deborah said...

"...the arrant nonsense that forms the bulk of the Queen's English Society website"

Hear, hear.

It is one of life's enduring mysteries that the QES is taken so seriously and that its announcements are widely and reverentially reported by so many news outlets in both the UK and abroad.

Bob Hale said...

Thanks for dropping by Deborah. It's always a pleasure to discover another word related blog.