When I was growing up my mother, who majored in English, corrected every misuse of speech that came out of my mouth. As a result I have tried to use words correctly. Since I worked in education, radio news broadcasting and in a law office in my earlier life, it was an absolute necessity that I speak clearly and correctly. I cringe today, though, when I hear people speak with mangled tongues.
There is an insurance commercial on TV now in which an actor uses the word (which is NOT a word) "alls," as in, "Alls I can say is...." What company/ad agency would let that get out to the public?
Then there are the news pundits who are obviously very shaky in grammar when they use the words "myself'' instead of "me" or "I;" or "yourself" instead of "you" as in "My friend and myself are going;" and "Someone such as yourself can do the job." You don't say "Myself is going." It doesn't take a genius to make the correction.
When letters came into the law office, inevitably there would be grammatical mistakes. How any self-respecting professional would allow a letter to be sent that way is beyond me. I had all I could do to stop from circling and underlining the mistakes in red pen and returning the letter to the sender with an admonition to go back to the fourth grade and listen this time!
Miss Fenwick would be proud of me!
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