Bitching about Buses

Today I want to moan about people who moan about bus services in Britain! There are areas in the UK where public transport is fairly bad. Yeah, and there are white elephants in Burma. To be honest, whenever I read a newspaper or see a report on television about how bad British public transport is, and how it used to be better, I want to write in and ask them whether they think that they are being just a little too selfish with regard to how they are being served by public transport.
Firstly, I know for a fact that my home town of Plymouth has an excellent bus service that reaches to every single area of the city, and the buses run at least every hour in all districts. All of these bus services run on time and link with one another to a reasonable degree. For example, on Saturday I purchased an ‘all day rider’ ticket and rode for three hours on 8 different bus route throughout Plymouth. I calculated that the deviation from the timetable averaged 4 minutes. I find it hard to believe that Plymouth is the only city in the UK where I can expect to be delivered where I want to go on time by the buses. In fact, the capitol, London, received an award for ‘City with the Best Public Transport’ in 2006. Clearly some cities receive an unparalleled service, whilst others do not, or people are making mountains out of molehills. I am inclined to think the latter.
Obviously, the buses and routes I have been looking at are city services and that facilities become fewer and further between in the country. Nevertheless, we have to look at these things in context. The reason that bus services are less frequent in the country is because there is less demand. There are fewer people who live in villages, and fewer people who have no car, and thus rely on a bus to take them where they want to go, so the bus services reflect this in their timetables. I recently did a survey for some Geography coursework and discovered that over 10% of residents in the particular village of my study needed a bus, and only 33% of interviewees would use the buses if the services were improved. Clearly the costs of running a service would not be met if residents continued to use their cars for journeys.
So, to conclude, what I mean to say is that if people want to have a good public transport system nationally, we need to make sure as a community that we use it. And if anyone wants to sample excellent bus services, I unhesitatingly recommend Plymouth.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Something that has been putting my back up lately is how some people seem to think that the English language is being used and, to use one persons words ‘degraded’, by the use of expressions such as ‘basically’ and ‘like’. I was reading an article in the newspaper and the comments of some readers and was astonished at how some people thought certain words were incongruous with English because they used both Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes, they are overused, young people use them more and, probably, because they don’t like them or understand them!
Why shouldn’t English speakers be able to use words that aren’t ‘proper’ English, such as ‘over-exaggerate’, ‘detrain’ or ‘diarise’? Just because these words are new to some people, don’t fit Latin grammatical rules etc. doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t use these words? Any etymologist or linguist will tell you that language evolves as time goes on and that the variety and complexity of a language is only added too by the creation of new words and the adoption of colloquialisms.
Furthermore, one of the specific beauties of the English language and one of the main reasons many believe that has led to its widespread popularity is because of its casual structure and lack of regimentation. Because English has been mangled and used differently in many countries, we have a richness and diversity that allows us to express ourselves in millions of ways. We can identify between house and home, black and dark and many others, mostly because we have allowed the language to develop that way. One of the most famous writers in literature, Shakespeare, is thought to have coined over 600 words, and that is a conservative estimate. These include:
- accessible
- fashionable
- priceless
- assassination
- crucial
- successful
- useless and useful
- impartial
- and vulnerable

So how can people say that the English that we are using is not the Queen’s English, doesn’t work grammatically, or is just not ‘correct’ way of talking? And if anyone tells me that I should speak properly and not use words that aren’t in the OED, I think I might just make the aware that one of the best new words we have in the English language is moron!