S.P.G.E. (Society for the Promotion of Grammatical Excellence)

This is a bare-assed post. No frills, just a narrative.

That said, I begin.

I posted a tweet this morning asking the Guardian newspapers just how one goes about the act of ‘declear’ – ing (It was in a headline) something. (spell check is underlining that word in red even as I type) I send a follow up tweet about the number of grammatical errors – gbagauns – in Nigerian newspapers being alarming and… egad! I am swept off with a flood of people gbagaun-ing me and pointing out my ‘grammatical error’. It turns out that they take objection to my use of the verb ‘is’ in my statement. At first, I’m flustered. This many people… I have to be wrong… so I recheck my tweet. I need not mention that I was correct (else I wouldn’t be blogging about this. *dougies*) but the point was that I took on the thankless task of ‘publicly schooling’ people as my tweetbuddy @naijarookie put it.

Bottom line, no one came back to thank me or to apologise for insulting me. I shrug and say that’s the price of social networks like twitter. Nobody is obliged to act with any form of decorum. We are nameless and faceless. We can speak before we think and melt into the nothingness of web pages afterwards. And, as my tweetbuddy so eloquently put it, ‘The fact that people have access to internet is no guarantee that they will use it to seek out knowledge.’

But I digress.

My post is about the SPGE (I am a floor member). I do not claim to be custodian of all the grammatical rules but I find the number of people who responded with scorn to my tweet, proclaiming it to be grammatically incorrect, to be simply shocking. Graduates of ‘ivy league’ Nigerian universities included. They can hardly be blamed though. If a respected newspaper such as the Guardian (and Thisday as well in which I once read a statement about ‘having told them several times severally’)  treats its membership of this society trivially, what do we expect of the plebeians who lay no such claim to elite verbiage? I have proposed to distribute Brighter Grammar textbooks at street corners and I have a volunteer already.

 

Update: The S.P.G.E. formerly known as Society for the Prevention of Grammatical Errors is to become Society for the Promotion of Grammatical Excellence. People seem to like this better.

Speech Stats

Image via Wikipedia

I like to go through stats. My blog, my email, I thrive on knowing details – it’s a habit of mine that’s been around. When I turned my attention to my phone and was looking at the usage stats on my phone recently, I was quite surprised to see that I’d logged over a hundred and seven hours of talk time. Now I am a very conservative user of the phone seeing as it’s been with me for almost two years and I am not in any way addicted to mid – night calls but the sheer amount of time that I’ve spoken for just took me aback – a little.

So I sit there thinking ‘over a hundred hours of talk time. What did I say?’ In view of the fact that most of these calls were made in few minute increments that’s a lot of calls to a lot of people. So what have I been saying to all these people? Have I spent the time complaining and carrying on? Have I spent the time making silly small talk or have I even said something brilliant to anyone in all that time? Have I ever said a word that helped someone get over something?

It’s easy to ignore what a few minutes can do but when they add up, we tend to start wondering where the time went and what we spent it doing. It reminds me of the part of scripture that says that men shall give account of every idle word spoken. That gives me a lot to think about, doesn’t it?

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