WSG is starting pointfor '˜English Society'

Joe Clifton, an Oxford graduate and schoolteacher, who would have been 100 years old this year had he lived, was lamenting the declining standards in the nation’s spoken and written English.

He did so through the letters page of the West Sussex Gazette, and the response was instant. There were plenty of people who shared exactly his concerns for the future of our language. Between them, they formed the Queen’s English Society.

The first meetings were in Arundel in 1972 where the Society continues to meet to this day. There is now a London branch and also a west Midlands branch, all carrying on the work which Joe began - work arguably more important than ever.

Leading the crusade today is the current president Bernard Lamb whose book The Queen’s English: And How To Use It has just been published by Michael O’Mara Books at £12.99. Emeritus reader in genetics at Imperial College, London, Bernard admits it is an uphill battle.

From the start in Arundel, members of the Society wrote to newspapers and anyone else responsible for producing printed material, pointing out the mistakes they spotted and any other examples of misused English.

And so it continues to this day.

“I didn’t know Joe Clifton,” Bernard says. “I never met him. He was simply a school teacher who cared about English.”

For him, the difference between effect and affect mattered; where was most definitely not interchangeable with wear, just as there was not their, nor here hear - no matter how much sloppy popular usage might suggest otherwise.

Bernard (oh horror!) suggests (surely not!) that newspapers are prime culprits. The Daily Telegraph twice recently spoke of censors buried in the road - “presumably holding clipboards”, Bernard suggests. Admittedly much of it is oversight (those instances when public loses its l; where window loses its n); but it is still wrong, wrong, wrong for the Queen’s English Society.

Bernard’s 40 years at Imperial College were a direct challenge. He would have to point out, for example, that a “bad diet which effects pregnancy” is actually the cause of that pregnancy; and that “complimentary genes” presumably go around being nice to each other.

He was responsible for a study, published last year, which found that overseas students at Imperial College made one third of the errors made by home-grown students - a fact which he hoped would shock a few English sensibilities to life.