Apologies for comming back on to the original thread after all this time.
I agree with so much of what has been said about the current standards of English - I sometimes despair at the notices that are circulated from University House (Head Office, as it were). If an institution of the sort to which I belong ( established in the '60s - not one of your "New" universities, says he snobbiishly) can't get it right, what hope is there?
I also remember quaking in my shoes when hearing, at the age of nine, that I was going up into Miss Treweek's class -she had a reputation as a Dragon of the first order. I soon found that she was an excellent teacher who rewarded effort just as surely as she punished slackness and grew to love her dearly. (Hers is the only name that I remember from my primary school days, which says something - even if only about my memory) It was her teaching that gave me reasonably good spelling and an instinctive grasp of correct grammar.
But her efforts to instil the rudiments of language, inter alia, were built upon a foundation of work by other competent teachers and, above all, on the help and encouragement that I received at home, which is so important.
A not insignificant number of people from the working-classes in the C19 learned to read (far more than learned to write) because they had parents - particularly mothers - who taught them their basic letters, and who then used this as a means to further education.
However, just to put this whole debate into some sort of longer perspective, I have to tell you that, when researching into something quite different, I came across a letter in one of the Manchester area newspapers - the Bolton Herald, I think - by a local employer deploring the standards of spelling and grammar amongst the young people that applied for jobs at his firm. These standards had dropped alarmingly over the past twenty years, he siad. The date of the paper was 1874.
