A little while ago there was a series of TV commercials for a sugary drink made of blackcurrants, detailing the variously horrible fates of those few blackcurrants that failed to become assimilated into the sorcerous brew concerned. The slogan at the end of each commercial read:

Nevermind – billions of berries make it

No, I am not making this up. The copy from the agency charged with the campaign spells it out (or, rather, doesn’t, and, in any case, shouldn’t.)

What kind of a word is nevermind? What part of speech does it represent? A preposition? A conjunction? Hardly likely: even English academics can’t tell the difference these days, as to avoid internecine grammar-envy all parts of speech are now being reduced to politically correct, woolly-liberal ejaculations.

The OED lists nevermind as an American colloquialism, but as a noun, which doesn’t make sense in the context of the commercial. What the copywriters meant to write was two separate words: never (an adverb) and mind (intransitive verb, I guess).

Please forgive me if I might be wrong here, but I am a victim of those same trendy educationalist cretins who thought that to learn proper English was elitist, and who marked me down as middle-class (and therefore wrong by definition) for writing that dinner was eaten in the evening, rather than at lunchtime – and no, I am not making that up, either.

Perhaps the copywriters grew up listening to Nevermind (sic), the 1991 album by grungeastes Nirvana. But this only illustrates the rapidity of the decline of English, at least in England (for Nirvana, being American, might be excused their own colloquialisms). The wholly British Sex Pistols, for all their cynically crafted anarchy, would never have called their iconic 1977 album anything other than Never Mind the B*llcks, which, while profane, is at least grammatically correct.

A while ago on this blog I defended the protean nature of English orthography against the schoolmarmish straitjacket of the Simplified Spelling Society. So, for a while, I reconciled myself to the fact that the engines of linguistic change are most likely to be fuelled by the mistakes of pig-ignorant illiterati who cannot be expected to know any better.

But the peculiarities of English spelling are matters simply of orthography, and not grammar. It matters less how you spell a word than for it to make sense in the structure of a sentence as a whole. Words, however spelled, are arranged in phrases and sentences to convey meaning, and this meaning should be clear.

So, whereas it is just about defensible (even if not forgiveable) for greengrocers to misplace their apostrophes — they are in business of selling cabbages, not maintaining recognizable grammatical standards — it is neither defensible nor forgiveable for copywriters to make such errors. These are people whose business is communication, of conveying a message, simply, unambiguously and succinctly, and that demands adherence to proper grammar.

What’s more, greengrocers are usually acting alone, and their signs (half-price cabbage’s) are often hand-drawn, not the end result of a long process in which the slogan would have been seen and scrutinized many times – not just by the writer, but by an editor, a proofreader, a printer, a TV producer and so on, all of whom, one supposes, will have had the benefits of at least a rudimentary education.

So, each time I saw the ‘nevermind’ slogan it occurred to me that this depth of ignorance afflicts not just one mind, but several, all along the line, not one of whom sought to check their grammar, but all of whom should have been expected to have known better, and to have spotted the error. But if they had spotted it, and taken the view that in this day and age, grammatical correctness is neither here nor there, even among people in the business of mass communication, then the battle is lost.

And if that is the case, who do these people think they are, that they can wilfully inflict such nonsense on the population more generally?

I am reminded of Swift’s Gulliver, who, having arrived home from the land of the Houyhnhnms, a country plagued by the humanoid Yahoos, and being forced to see his fellow humans in a new and altogether unforgiving light, writes:

“… but when I behold a lump of deformity, and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together.”

It is no coincidence that the Yahoos were capable of no language whatsoever save for miscellaneous ejaculations – the only part of speech they were capable of uttering.