Interviewer: Now, professor, recently you wrote a letter to a leading national newspaper complaining about falling standards in both written and spoken language among students, even graduates, and saying that you deplore the way English is being debased by change and dumbing down... Interviewee: Yes, I said that standards are falling and that very few graduates these days can write a comprehensible essay ... their grammar and syntax is all over the place... um... and l do have certain regrets over the way some words have now become unusable in their full meaning because they've been sloppily misused by those who should know better, such as journalists. So, because they use, say, "enormity" to mean something very big instead of something very wicked, I can no longer use the word in its correct sense without being misunderstood. And there are hundreds of other cases like this. But, of course, language changes, and meanings shift and change emphasis, and it's as useless to complain about that as it is to moan about the weather. The point I was making was that, at the earliest possible level, children should be made familiar with the basics of grammar and syntax, how to put sentences together, and so on. But I'm not suggesting going back to the days when, as I did, you had to analyse sentences in minute detail as if you were doing Latin. Though, of course, there is something to be said for having that kind of detailed understanding of the language.