English
Language
By Col. Riaz Jafri (Retd.)
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
A news report regarding the
derailment of a train in an English daily published
from several cities starts with the sentence,
“None of the passengers were reported dead
or injured when ----”. Oh Baba, “None
of the passengers WAS reported dead …”
None is singular and must have the verb in the
singular form.
In our high school days we were advised by our
teachers to listen to the BBC to correct our English
pronunciation and to read a good newspaper (Civil
& Military Gazette in those days) to improve
our diction and spellings.
Alas ‘reading the newspapers’ part
is no more applicable for, the number of mistakes
in newspapers these days is alarmingly high. One
wonders as to why in this age of computers with
superb software for ‘Spell Check’,
Thesaurus, Grammar Check, and what not, and a
horde of proof readers, sub-editors, editors and
chief editors around, such bloopers could escape
detection. The only answer for the confounding
situation is that there is no death of the nincompoops.
Har shaakh peh ulloo baithha hai anjaam-e gulistan
kia hoga?
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