i'm not one who uses big fancyschmancy words in my daily conversations or even in my blog, but one thing i'm exceptionally particular with is ensuring that my word-spellings are correct and that my sentences are strung well with flawless grammar - or at least i try my best to.
as i browse through our local newspapers each day, i can't help but to be irked by the numerous grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in many of the articles. seriously, does the editor know that his/her job is to proofread all his writers' works? many people say reading the newspapers will improve your language. hah! with the standard of english rendered in our msian papers, i beg to differ, please.
today i got so appalled after spotting a few unforgivable mistakes that i just HAD to send in a complaint, in which i stated that "dessert" and "desert" are two very different things. harhar. call it an oversight, call it a typo, but i don't think the newspapers should leave any room for flaws in language especially since they have a regular section dedicated to promoting correct usage of English. don't get me wrong, some articles are written perfectly well, but there are some which obviously lack flair, and some that make you wonder if the writer actually passed his/her high school english paper.
another matter left me in dismay today, having read that words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire", "monarch", "abbey" and "willow" have been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make way for words/phrases like "MP3 player", "voicemail" and "attachment". wow. astounding. no wonder kids are getting more and more dimwitted these days. sooner or later the mere existence of a good storybook will be obsolete and we will see kids obese by the age of five sitting in front of their computers retrieving voicemails and listening to MP3s of shit songs. i'm not saying that it is wrong for kids to know the meanings of these words, but to remove such common words like those mentioned earlier just doesn't make any sense.
do you remember our enid blyton days? haha. i wonder how many times we came across the word "willow". pity, now kids won't even know what that is. =P
