Sparked by a post by Chris over at monosyllabically.com in which Chris, in essence, notes how watch­ing the news on TV has a neg­at­ive effect on her, and how “NOT watch­ing the news has improved my psyche.”; I was promp­ted to comment

I agree entirely, Chris. I haven’t watched the TV news for nearly 12 months! In fact, I try not to watch TV at all. I watch films, and occa­sion­ally sit down with my daugh­ter and watch some­thing ‘harm­less’ on the Dis­ney Channel.

Unfor­tu­nately, I often hear the news on the radio which my part­ner insists on hav­ing on most of the time. It just con­firms my opin­ion that the world at large is los­ing it’s mor­als, it’s intel­li­gence, and is get­ting more trivial and petty. Or is that just the media?

Of pref­er­ence I will read books, listen to music, cre­ate some­thing (usu­ally com­puter pro­grams), have con­ver­sa­tions (online and IRL), and read blogs!

I for­got to men­tion that like another com­menter I too don’t read news­pa­pers or magazines (except tech­nical ones).

You know, I’m old enough (40) to remem­ber when the news (TV/radio/newspaper) didn’t require EVERY story to have a superlative!

I mean, in the UK, every single head­line story seems to have a super­lat­ive: “the worst xxx in 40 years”, “the most yyy since the war”, I’ve even heard “the cold­est month this year” in February!

There must be armies of research­ers sift­ing through records to find that cru­cial super­lat­ive and the appro­pri­ate time period. Or per­haps they make them all up. Who would know?

An example: the recent earth­quake we had in Eng­land was quite minor (4.8 on the richter scale) com­pared to those suffered in other coun­tries: Build­ings near the epi­centre had minor struc­tural dam­age, but there were NO reports of injur­ies. The 7:30 news on my local radio sta­tion that morn­ing repor­ted the story quite sens­ibly, with inter­views from people who were frightened, police men who’d been inund­ated with calls, etc. Quite a reas­on­able story, not too sen­sa­tional. By the 8:00 news, the story was reduced to a sound bite: “Eng­land Rocked by Worst Earth­quake in 60 Years!!” and a couple more sen­tences. You could actu­ally hear the exclam­a­tion marks and the capitalisation.

I hear it all the time in con­ver­sa­tions now: Every­one talks about “the worst this”, “the best that”, “the most”, “the least”. People no longer say “Last night I had a great night out.”, they appar­ently had “The Best Night Ever!”… Until next week, when the also have the “The Best Night Ever!”, unless they have “The Worst Night Ever!” for a change.

The Eng­lish lan­guage used to be won­der­ful for its sub­tleties and its shades of mean­ing. There are often dozens of words to use to modify, qual­ify or enhance a par­tic­u­lar adject­ive, or adverb, par­tic­u­larly if one includes regional col­lo­qui­al­isms. Today things are ‘top’ or ‘naff’, they are ‘the best’ or ‘the worst’, people are loved or hated, foot­ball teams are the ‘best’ or ‘nowhere’, you are either suc­cess­ful or a loser. Everything is extremes, there are no shades anymore.

I sup­pose it still is won­der­ful, the Eng­lish lan­guage; there are many skilled authors around, some bet­ter than oth­ers. But it seems that no longer is it a require­ment for mass media writers to have a mas­tery of the Eng­lish lan­guage, or even a good grasp of it. The most basic of under­stand­ing will do. Gram­mar is not required, spell check­ers will cor­rect their most obvi­ous errors. A good grasp of one-up-manship in sen­sa­tional head­lines is more valu­able than actu­ally being able to string together a coher­ent sen­tence. The same seems to be true for advert­ising copy writers too, includ­ing the sen­sa­tional headlines!

Maybe I’m just an old fogy, wish­ing for the old days, and bemoan­ing the “state of the kids today”? Or maybe I’m one of the last gen­er­a­tion to get a decent edu­ca­tion in this country.

Ho hum.