Dumb? No, just linguistically subtle

She goes on to lambast the prevailing belief “that it is oppressive, snobbish and culturally imperialist to ask children to speak in sentences and observe basic grammar.”

Oh dear. I don’t wish to enrage Libby further — though she’s majestic when roused — but I fear that she was premature in welcoming the QCA’s publication. I have now read it from cover to cover. Far from cracking down on “sloppy” speech, the booklet legitimises it.

What’s incendiary about it, in fact, is its attempt to cloak slapdash speaking in a hilarious new vocabulary of pseudo-academic jargon. So you are infuriated when your teenage kids drop the word “like” into every, like, sentence? Or when they end every statement with “y’know”? Fret not! In the QCA’s view, superfluous irritants such as “y’know” and “like”, are perfectly acceptable “discourse markers” that help listeners “orient to the topic”. Whatever that means.

And those exasperating moments when you ask your children what they did at school, only to receive a mumbled “oh, stuff” or such like in reply. Relax, parents! These, according to the QCA’s “oracy” experts, are admirable instances of “vague language” being “used to mark friendliness or to avoid sounding over-assertive or too elaborate”. Such sophistication, the QCA continues, “is often wrongly taken as a sign of careless thinking or sloppy expression”.

So there you have it. Your kids are being linguistically subtle. You are the dumb one for not realising it.

And youngsters who don’t speak in whole sentences? I’m afraid Libby will feel badly let down here, too. Omitting key words from spoken sentences is called “ellipsis”. And, according to the QCA, “ellipsis enables efficient, clear communication”.

In short, the QCA’s booklet offers not a prescription for improving spoken English among teenagers, but a tendentious justification for the slipshod way in which they speak, or don’t speak, English at present. The QCA’s experts even quote, approvingly, a truly excruciating sentence — “It’s a bit panicky, but I’ve not got any deadlines like you have though” — because this wretched succession of words might have been “brought about by the demands of real-time and face-to-face communication”.

Indeed, it might have been. But that’s no reason not to deplore it. A fact of real life, perhaps not best appreciated by those cushioned in the groves of academe, is that people who speak English appallingly are usually barred from creative or rewarding jobs (except, possibly, in football management).

So every time we turn a fashionable blind eye to incomprehensible teenagers, we are effectively shoving them on to the lowest rung of the social ladder. The implication of the QCA’s non-judgemental approach, intended or not, is that this is OK.

Funnily enough, the QCA isn’t the only arm of government currently interesting itself in spoken English. The Home Office has just ruled that everyone applying for British citizenship needs to demonstrate a linguistic competence equivalent to “ESOL Entry 3” (ESOL being a widely agreed curriculum called English for Speakers of Other Languages). At this level candidates are required to “communicate orally information, feelings and opinions on familiar topics, using appropriate formality”.

Hmm. That sounds a lot tougher than the level of spoken English that the QCA seems to expect from homegrown schoolchildren. Which surely can’t be right. Perhaps British teenagers, too, should be required to reach ESOL Entry 3 before being allowed a British passport. For some of them, the prospect of being denied their annual fortnight’s bonking and boozing in Ibiza might be a compelling inducement to articulate the Queen’s English like wot it should be spoke.

HERE BE TREASURE

IN EDINBURGH to cover the festival, I find that visiting Americans are much less keen to discuss the alleged excitements on the Fringe (the Croatian Car Boot Lapdancing Experience is proving most popular) than to rave about Rosslyn Chapel, six miles south of the city. This remarkable church is not exactly a new sensation, of course, having been built almost 600 years ago. But a bestselling US thriller has thrust it into the consciousness of susceptible Yanks by reviving the old chestnut that within its curiously carved pillars and mysterious sealed crypt are enshrined the ancient secrets of Christendom, including the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

The book is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a right old fandango of historical hokum that links Leonardo’s Last Supper with supposed assassination squads operated by clandestine ultra-conservative Roman Catholic organisations today. Total tosh, of course, but ingeniously woven round the well-worn hypothesis that Jesus didn’t die on the Cross, but was secretly smuggled to France where he married Mary Magdalene and raised a family. According to the book, the clues that will unravel this 2,000-year-old conspiracy are all enshrined within the esoteric wall and ceiling symbols at Rosslyn Chapel.

Which is why, if you visit the place this summer, you are likely to see dozens of visitors earnestly scrutinising carvings, taking compass bearings, pacing out distances between pillars, or doing feverish cryptological calculations on the back of guidebooks. Don’t knock it. With the Loch Ness Monster in long-term hibernation, and the weather this August varying from the atrocious to the merely miserable, Scotland’s tourist industry needs all the help it can get.

Perhaps someone should write a new thriller claiming that, buried somewhere in the new Scottish Parliament, are incredible treasures — namely, more than £400 million of taxpayers’ money. No, on second thoughts, that’s too tall a tale even for American tourists to swallow.