The heroic pedant?

Here’s a strange story, you might think. Last week on the Isle of Wight a warning sign erected to alert motorists that pedestrians might be crossing the road was removed after complaints were received by the police that it was grammatically incorrect. It is crazy, some have suggested, to prioritise correct grammar over road safety, and indeed to involve the police in this endeavour. In fact you might ponder whether the constabulary are being called upon to feel the collars of greengrocers displaying errant apostrophes when selling tomatoes, or of the writers of reports eschewing the required subjunctive in appropriate contexts.

Well, if I were (not ‘was’) a policeman, I might think that knife crime is a better object of my attentions. But does that mean that we should all just enjoy the carnival of grammar chaos rather than get exercised by the inability of the population to see the difference between its and it’s? Should we worry that nobody now seems to know when to use ‘me’ and when to say ‘I’? We could of course point to the history of the English language, and the fact that rules of grammar were something of a latecomer to the party. And if we really hate the sort of person who keeps correcting others, we might alert them to research that suggests they suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

However, there are arguments in favour of linguistic pedantry. A friend of mine has pointed out that there is a difference between a ‘walking stick’ and a ‘walking-stick’, the former being a stick that walks. We might not expect to encounter an autonomous ambulatory stick, but there are plenty of misunderstandings that could in other contexts be caused by a missing or wrongly-placed hyphen. Language is about communication, and precision of meaning is not unimportant, particularly in certain settings. We should perhaps not be exercised by what we hear on the street or by what we see in a greengrocer’s shop window, but in more formal settings we should continue to encourage the observance of rules that support effective communication and preserve the richness of the English language.

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We’re learning to disrespect respect, and it’s not good.

Back in the 1980s I remember watching a political debate on television, in which two well-known politicians engaged in robust disagreement. Just a few hours later I was on a plane from the city in which they had been arguing, and found to my surprise that the same two politicians were sitting next to each other engaging in what was clearly very friendly banter. A good thing, or a bad thing? Were they, in a sort-of-private setting, subverting the integrity of their political disagreement by being friendly to each other? Or was this a sign of maturity and civilised human interaction?

Of course we can still sometimes see this sort of private bonhomie between political opponents, but not so often. Recently the UK Labour Party’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, suggested that he could never be friends with a member of the Conservative Party. What this kind of approach suggests is that politics is not so much about choices, but about ethics: whatever political frame of reference I hold is the only valid one, and therefore if you don’t agree with me, you are not so much wrong as evil.

Respect, baby, as Aretha Franklin might have said, is at the heart of civilisation. We lose it and we’re all on skids. Of course we should have principles and we should argue our case, but if we come to believe that our opponents are our enemies and are hateful evildoers, then we become incapable of persuading our entire society to believe in a cause, because we hold many of its members in contempt as enemies of the people. It’s what has characterised the Brexit debate, or Mr Trump’s America. Trust me, this isn’t the way to go. Don’t disrespect respect.

PS. If you’re sharpening your quill to tell me it was Otis Redding and not Aretha, save yourself the bother. I prefer her version, which is subtly different. Though I totally love Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, which by a happy coincidence is playing in the background as I write this.

Understanding student loneliness

Some years ago, when I was President of Dublin City University, I decided to take a little time on Christmas Day to offer coffee and light Christmas snacks to students staying in the university halls of residence over the holiday period. A good number turned up. Some of them were there because they came from national or cultural backgrounds where Christmas was not a holiday, and a few were there because, frankly, they had nowhere else to go. It was a pleasant get-together overall, but what stayed in my mind most was a conversation with a young woman who told me that, for many students (and not just those still in residence), this was a particularly lonely time of year. She said that for anyone feeling a sense of challenge or stress, or any kind of lack of self-respect, the end of the year was the very worst time.

Just this past week, Oxford University Students Union referred to a report by the Office of National Statistics that revealed that young people make up the loneliest age group in society. The Union draws attention to the need to address this very human problem at this time of year. It is indeed important for universities to show awareness of student loneliness, and to offer support, and sometimes just empathy. It is important to give students an assurance that they do not have to be alone, and that there are people to whom they can talk. It is a good time to communicate such messages to the whole student body.