This page explains the "what", why" and "who" of the QES Academy but from here you can also access the following special features:
- The QES Punctuation Guide demystifies the rules of punctuation.
- The Rogues' Gallery where prominent persons who misuse the language are named and shamed.
- The QES Approach explaining the QES attitude to correct English. Are you a prescriptivist or a descriptivist?
- Academies overview introducing academies in other languages and what they do.
- Style - explaining what constitutes good style in English.
- The People's English - Showing just how badly ordinary people use their mother tongue.
What is The QES Academy ?
Why The QES Academy ?
Why do we need The QES Academy ?
Who can use The QES Academy ?
Why The QES Academy ?
Other languages (French and Spanish, for example) have supreme authorities that try, while moving with the times, to define what is good and acceptable usage and what is not. They do not stop the language from changing over the years but they do provide a measure of linguistic discipline and try to retain valid and useful neologisms (new terms) while rejecting passing fads that may be in use today but are not destined to endure. The French and Spanish “Academies” were founded many centuries ago and have gained in stature and respect with time. English has never had any such “Academy”. The 21st century is a bit late to start one, especially as English, even more than the immensely widespread languages of French and Spanish, has become a truly universal language, spoken and used as a means of communication amongst people all over the world. But precisely because our language is so widespread – and also because there has been a dreadful devaluation and deterioration of education in our hectic modern, digitalised world – we do desperately need some form of moderating body to set an accepted standard of good English. So The QES Academy is a 21st century attempt, drawing precisely on the digitalised nature of the world today, to provide an authoritative and respected “Academy of the English Language” that is both strict in its criteria yet open to all the many regional flavours that English has to offer.
For an overview of language-regulating academies, their histories and achievements, click here.
DISCLAIMER - One of the functions of The QES Academy is to serve as a portal to many third-party sites. This is one of the strengths of this site. These third-party sites are very informative but The QES cannot, of course, accept any responsibility for the quality of English that they use. Any errors of English usage that may there occur are beyond our control.
What is The QES Academy ?
Firstly, we must define what is meant by "Academy". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an academy is either a place of study or training in a special field or a society or institution of distinguished scholars, artists, or scientists that aims to promote and maintain standards in its field. The QES Academy is definitely of the latter type, its aim being to promote and maintain high standards of English usage.
An Internet search will reveal many "Academies of English" including the "Queen's English Academy" in French-speaking Switzerland but, with the exception of the QES and the English Academy of Southern Africa, all the others are language schools.
The main headings of the QES Academy provide direct access to dictionaries, points of grammar, comparisons between the two great versions of English – the original UK English and the derivative US English. A section devoted to regional English provides a platform for other English-speaking communities – Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Indians, Africans, etc. – to describe and define their own particular usage and a section on errors will explain why certain common usages, although accepted into everyday language, are incorrect and how they can be replaced by correct turns of phrase. Finally, there is an e-mail address to which absolutely anyone may freely send comments, criticisms and suggestions which, if they contribute to the general wealth of the site, will be incorporated into its content.
Why do we need The QES Academy ?
Why is it necessary to have any sort of “Academy” or whatever to “govern” the use of a language in the first place?
To answer this question, we need firstly to decide what a language is and why we need one in any case. Why do we utter noises and perform the act of talking? We do that to communicate. Certain animals also communicate by making noises (birds and dolphins, for example) but we humans are the only animals capable of shaping the sounds by forcing air from the lungs through a set of vocal chords and then moulding them with our throats, tongues, teeth and lips. Why do we go to all that trouble? Because we want to form very specific sets of sounds that are called words and we give each word a very specific meaning. By stringing these word patterns together, we form sentences that express what we are thinking in such a way that another person, on picking up that sound pattern can convert it back into a thought which is identical to our original thought. That is simple enough. But for this to work, we have to have a code. This code is described below.
Who can use The QES Academy?
As has been said, everyone, without exception – English mother-tongue or foreign – can benefit from using The QES Academy.
Users of English can be broadly divided potentially into nine categories unlike users of virtually all other languages who can be divided into only six categories. In any language, the users can be divided “vertically” into mother-tongue and foreign, and “horizontally” into specialist, highly-educated and poorly-educated. English, however, has become almost unique in adding a third vertical category – the official language speaker. This is the person who speaks English as his official or national language even though his true mother tongue is a local language. Prime examples of this are India or Nigeria where each region has its own language yet the only lingua franca for the entire country is English. This breakdown is set out in the following table.
|
Mother tongue |
Official language |
Foreign |
|
1 Specialist: The ultimate authority on the language; may be a university professor or a professional linguist. Few in number, a small percentage of the population. |
2 Specialist: May be as good as the mother-tongue counterpart. Will have studied in Britain; probably from the Commonwealth. Very few in number. |
3 Specialist: A tiny number of persons holding doctorates in English-language studies. Found mainly in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. |
|
4 Highly-educated: Persons who have a university education or equivalent, who are qualified professionals in medicine, law, science, diplomatic service, etc. but who have no specialised English-language training. |
5 Highly-educated : Persons who have a university education or equivalent, who are qualified professionals in medicine, law, science, diplomatic service, etc. but who have no specialised English-language training. |
6 Highly-educated : Persons who have a university education or equivalent, who are qualified professionals in medicine, law, science, diplomatic service, etc. and who speak English as a foreign language. |
|
7 Poorly-educated: Persons educated up to primary or lower secondary level. Have no idea of or interest in good English. |
8 Poorly-educated: Persons educated up to primary or lower secondary level. Have virtually no English. |
9 Poorly-educated: Persons educated up to primary or lower secondary level. Have no English at all. |
There are, of course, all manner of intermediate graduations between these categories, e.g. the manual worker who goes to Britain or the USA to work for a few years will obviously (we would hope) pick up a smattering of the language but that would not suffice to promote him from category 9 to category 6.
Persons in category 1 would constitute the supreme authority on the English language but are a relatively rare species. Those in categories 2 and 3 could, in extremely rare cases match their category 1 counterparts but would probably be able to teach mother-tongue speakers in category 4 a thing or two.
Persons in category 4 are in many cases brilliant specialists in their respective areas but heaven help them (or us) if they have to set their wisdom down in writing or deliver a speech in English at a conference! They frequently say what they do not mean (see the Humpty-Dumpty syndrome below) or are so disorganised in their mode of expression as to be incomprehensible. They would be so much more useful if they referred to The QES Academy before opening their laptops or mouths.
Persons in category 5 suffer the same shortcomings as those in category 4 but are much more amusing to read and listen to because of their extraordinary turns of phrase and mispronunciations – but they are by no means any less brilliant in their respective fields.
Persons in category 6 are all those people who will proudly tell you that “I heff for six muns English in Bournmaous (or Brighton or Blackpool - it matters not) studied and vos topp off mine class. Don’t vurry viz zee interpreter, mine English is poerfekt.” And nothing will convince them otherwise. The QES Academy could certainly help them – if only they were not so arrogant.
Category 7 is the vast ignorant mass of under-educated who couldn’t care a damn about “posh” English, “innit?”. The QES Academy has everything to offer them – but they are just not interested. How sad.
Category 8 probably do not have access to the Internet so they would not know about The QES Academy and would find it too complicated anyhow.
And finally, category 9 might find some useful phrases for their shopping weekend in London or New York if they care to take the trouble.
All this having been said, the QES Academy is an interactive site which, on the one hand, provides advice and - through its QES Library - guidance and many sources of information on the use of English and, on the other, is open to the public and through the Academy's e-mail address, we will be pleased to receive questions, contributions and even criticism from the general public (of whichever of the above categories). Please contact us and help make this a lively and constantly-developing site for the good of all who use the English language in any capacity.
The Code
This code assigns a certain meaning to each word and both the speaker and the listener have to have the same code. That is what we call language. If two people have different languages, that is to say different codes, the thought cannot be conveyed. For example, an Englishman meets a Russian and the Englishman says “bog” and the Russian will understand “god”; or an Italian meets a Spaniard and the Italian says “burro” meaning “butter” but the Spaniard will understand “donkey”. Sounds silly, but that is how it is and this confusion arises not only between languages but even within a given language. Consider the case of the American tourist who arrives in Britain and hires (rents?) a car to go touring. After driving for a couple of hours, he reaches a provincial town and looks for a place to park the car. He finds just the slot he needs up a side street and parks. He is about to get out of the car when he sees a notice on the wall where he has parked which reads “Please do not park on the pavement.” He stops, gives the matter some thought then gets back into the car and drives it up onto the pavement and leaves it there. Why? Bloody-minded? No. He has obligingly done as the notice requested. It asked him not to park on the pavement so he obediently removed it from the pavement and parked on the sidewalk. What went wrong? Different code. The British “pavement” is the American “sidewalk” and the American “pavement” is the British “carriageway”.
Exactly the same misunderstandings can arise when people misuse words or use them to mean whatever they want them to mean. This is the “Humpty-Dumpty” syndrome. Anyone who has read “Alice through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll will recall the very frustrating conversation between Alice and the highly opinionated, ovoid Humpty-Dumpty who sat on a wall:
At one point, Humpty Dumpty says, “There's glory for you!'
“I don't know what you mean by 'glory',” Alice said. 
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don't – till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'”
“But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument',” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
And that is the Humpty-Dumpty syndrome – using words to express a meaning other than the meaning they have in the accepted code – or in the dictionary. This may seem odd, but all sorts of people do it, mostly because they have no idea of the real meaning of the words they use or because they confuse words that are similar in appearance or sound. Either way, misusing the code in this way results in a breakdown of communication. And as the sole purpose of language is communication, the whole exercise becomes pointless. This happens because of ignorance and ignorance – at least where language is concerned – is not the prerogative of the lower classes; it is to be found all the way up the social scale. A person may be a brilliant doctor, lawyer, diplomat, engineer or what-have-you, but his – or her – knowledge and use of language may remain abysmal. The QES Academy and its associated QES Library constitute a site that no-one can afford to ignore and which everyone needs to draw upon.
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