What are these good people doing? Yes, that's right, sonny, they are protesting. Every Englishman's born right. But let's be quite clear - they are proTESTing. They are proTESTors. What they are engaged in is a PROtest, but that doesn't make them PROtesters. I proTEST that this is another nasty little distortion of the English language - imported, like as not, from Silicon Valley.
Along with that other increasingly popular mangling of decent speech - SUBscribers, who presumably SUBscribe to magazines or whatever. SubSCRIBERS, please. I suppose they don't pay a SUBscription - or, awful thought, do they? Anything goes.
The destruction of the English language seems to have developed a hideous momentum of its own, like a Greek tragedy. Take 'refrigerator'. A large mouthful for a common thing, so we contract it. Chambers lays it out quite clearly - contraction 'frig', pronounced, of course, 'frij'. But no, it must be spelt 'fridge'. I have waited years for the inevitable to happen, and the other day it did. A glossy brochure proclaimed the qualities of the latest - wait for it - 'refridgerator'. Another victory for the hordes of text-messagers.
You don't care? Many don't. I do.
