The Queen's English Society is a charity that aims to keep the English language safe from perceived declining standards.[1] The current President is Dr. Bernard Lamb, a former Reader in Genetics at Imperial College.
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The Queen's English Society was founded in 1972 by Joe Clifton, an Oxford graduate and schoolteacher. The Society's meetings were held in Arundel, and members wrote to newspapers and broadcasters, pointing out perceived linguistic errors and instances of ambiguous spoken English.
The Society claims to be concerned about the education of children. It believes that teachers should be trained to spot certain errors in English usage. In 1988, the Society delivered a petition to the then Secretary of State for Education and Science, Kenneth Baker, urging him "to introduce the compulsory study of formal grammar, including parsing and sentence analysis, into the school curriculum".
The objectives of the Society, as expressed in its constitution, "are to promote the maintenance, knowledge, understanding, development and appreciation of the English language as used both colloquially and in literature; to educate the public in its correct and elegant usage; and to discourage the intrusion of anything detrimental to clarity or euphony”.
In June 2010 the QES announced that it had formed an Academy of English, a language reference website. The founder of the academy was quoted as saying that: "At the moment, anything goes. Let’s set down a clear standard of what is good, correct, proper English. Let’s have a body to sit in judgment."[2]
The Academy attracted widespread press coverage, some positive and some negative, and the QES enjoyed a surge in membership. In September 2010 the QES deleted the "Academy" content from its website, though the Academy was continued by its own board on a separate website,[3] which is linked to that of the QES and vice versa.
A Daily Telegraph opinion piece[4] had called the QES Academy "both welcome and long overdue. Authoritative bodies exist to maintain the purity of the French, Spanish and Italian languages, but English has been left to fend for itself at a time when it is under unprecedented attack." The Guardian believed that the Academy would seek to "protect the language from innovations",[5] although its members had insisted that it would "mov[e] with the times"[2]
American phoneticist Mark Liberman called the QES "even more illogical, hypocritical and badly informed than you'd expect them to be".[6] In the Baltimore Sun John E McIntyre wrote: "the peevish combination of shibboleth and superstition about language, combined with a sad, sad little snobbery about their presumed mastery of the language, renders these people [the QES] impervious to reason",[7] referencing an analysis of their nascent website by Stan Carey.[8] Comedian David Mitchell disliked the "self-appointed" nature of the Academy and asked "By what authority would they sit in judgment?".[9] The proposal was received with scepticism by The Economist's Lane Greene.[10]
The Society’s quarterly journal, Quest, has been sent to members since 1979. It includes articles, letters from members, news, book reviews, puzzles and poems. Books published by the QES include The Queen's English: And How to Use It by Bernard Lamb, and Shakin' the Ketchup Bot'le, a compilation of articles from Quest.
The aims of the Society were restated in a lighthearted way in a recent issue of Quest.[11] ″The good old Queen's English Society campaigns for linguistic propriety. The pose of its foes is no match for those who use English in all its variety.″