Your language is... like... bad

Viji Suresh is a 25-year-old content writer. Her parents have been trying hard to set her up with prospective grooms, but with little success. Viji does a lot of reading and blogging, and simply loves the English language. When a particular prospect once told her that he too enjoyed blogging, she decided to check out his posts for herself. What she saw left her horrified.

 “The blog was an assault on the English language. I don’t think this educated man had ever used an apostrophe in his life. His punctuations and adjectives were haywire. And in one instance, instead of writing ‘hats off to you’, he simply said ‘hats to you’,” she recollected, still appalled.

As the world celebrated United Nations Celebrates English Language Day on Tuesday, many lovers of the language like Viji reflected on commonplace linguistic and grammatical mistakes that irk them no end.

Theatre personality Ajit Saldanha, for instance, harbours a pathological disgust for people who generously pepper every conversation with the word ‘like’. “It sounds like teenages talking to one another; it’s irritating. When someone comes to report a conversation and ends up saying ‘She was like blah blah and I was like blah blah’, I can’t help but ask these people what they are really ‘like’,” he says.

Last year, Educational Testing Service (ETS) administered some eight million English-language assessments through its TOEFL and TOEIC assessment programmes. and yet, language lovers still find reason to bemoan the language they are subjected to both on social networking sites and in real life.