Probable Cause

I received an email last week from my daughter's college. Hampshire schools, for whatever reason, do not have "sixth forms"; instead, students wishing to study A Levels and the like must attend one of a number of post-16 colleges with anything from 1,500-3,500 students each.

It can be a bit impersonal, as there are multiple large classes in the popular subjects, and it's all very different from my own long-ago sixth-form years in the last century. This impersonality puts a large premium on the quality of communication between the college, students and parents.

The subject of the mail I received is irrelevant, though I was irritated by the fact that it betrayed an oh-don't-bother-me attitude to an important matter. No, it was the spelling that got my attention. Here is the first significant sentence, with X and Y substituted for the actual items:

"The [X] and [Y] would of been sent to you seperately."

OK. "Seperately" I can accept -- I doubt my partner knows how to spell "separately", as it happens*. But "would of" always gets my goat.

Then came the next two sentences:

"The form your completed has been crossed through proberly by me and marked completed. So two things could of happened."

Proberly?? Did she mean "probably"? Do you know, in all the poorly-written job applications, memos, emails, and semi-literate scribblings that have passed before my eyes, I have never before seen that one. It's not a mistake, either, or a typo for "properly", as she repeats it later on. However, I see there are 1,400,000 hits on Google for "proberly", so I've clearly led a sheltered life, orthographically-speaking.

Now, as I think I've made clear in previous posts, I'm not by nature one of those reactionary pedants who recoil and reach for the green ink on hearing some ugly new coinage. I enjoy and employ fashionable usages and occupational argot, and have no problem at all with the fact that language changes. I'm liking it, even. But I am a bit of a spelling fascist.

Why, you might ask, would someone be tolerant in some areas of language use and yet be so intolerant in others, especially one as arbitrary (and divisive) as spelling? Good question. For me, it's like this:

Of all the causes of evil in this world, of which there are many, the two that I find bother me most often -- perhaps because I encounter them so frequently -- are ignorance and carelessness. These "minor" vices bother me because they are unnecessary and easily fixed but, unchecked, quickly turn into the major vices of stupidity and malice.

It bothers me that someone, for example, who is employed to communicate with parents from within an educational institution can pay so little attention to the written word and to her own standards of literacy that she has not noticed that she cannot spell a word that must pass in front of her careless eyes -- properly spelled and in clear, printed letters -- at least a dozen times every week. Probably more.

Obviously, standards have changed in recent times, and no one likes to be the sort of prig who bounces such errors straight back to sender. I expect Miss Proberly sails through her annual appraisal; a lovely person with just the right customer-facing attitude. But would you accept this core-level carelessness from the mechanic who services your car? OK, he left in the old spark-plugs, and didn't replace the oil -- oh, and look, he's put oily marks all over your upholstery -- but why get hung up on prissy details, when he's such a nice bloke! The car still goes, doesn't it?

I accept that some people have poor literacy skills, and probably get by without them very well (though that's questionable). After all, my bricklaying isn't up to much, or my object-oriented programming, come to that. But for a literate person in a clerical job to misspell "probably" as "proberly" shows a wilful lack of self-awareness, shading into arrogance, that is every bit as witless as the person who emerges from a shop, unwraps a sandwich, and tosses the packaging onto the pavement, right next to the bin.

Trivial, yes, and no laws other than those of grammar have been broken. But it's symptomatic of a social malaise, something that could yet slowly poison everything for everyone. "Carelessness" is dangerous because the thing is, we can't really pick and choose what to care about. A caring state of mind is indivisible. Careless spelling is on the same continuum as failing to check properly the points on a railway junction. It's one of those areas where the personal really is the political.

But did I send an email back, correcting her spelling and explaining the folly of "would of / could of"? Of course I didn't. I suppose you might say I just didn't care enough.

* Isn't it odd how people seem to think that studying English at degree level bestows full Complete Plain Words style authority (or, in these diminished times, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves style authority") on the English graduate? Do they think there are compulsory papers on "spelling really difficult words" and "speaking proper"?