Can I help you today?

I walked into a local café yesterday on a lazy mission to grab some lunch (many cafés do specialise in this particular type of meal at lunchtime), have a sit down and read the Times without fear of a family member looking at me disapprovingly for reading at the table. 

A lovely waitress, most likely in her early twenties (final year at university reading accountancy she later volunteered), came over, sprayed the already rather clean table top with liquid guaranteed to kill 99.9% of all know germs (I always tend to worry more about the other 0.1% of germs that could potentially be fatal) and then asked me that damning of all questions.

"Can I help you today?"

Now given that I hadn't yet thought about what I might consume for lunch, that she asked if she could help, was indeed appreciated. But I was now worried that quantifying the timing as she did, namely "today", might infer that if she couldn’t help me at that particular juncture, I may have to wait overnight so as to benefit from her help when the new day dawned, that is, "tomorrow".

She then went on to volunteer that the café had "a ton of specials" on offer, should I be interested, and that if she could "help me on my journey through the menu space" all I had to do was "reach out to her".

That a young lady in her twenties should be talking such utter gibberish to an old bugger like me was a concern in itself. And of course, being in a north Manchester town, the gibberish was accompanied by much dropping of the letter "t" from the middle of words and the omission of the letter "g" from the end of her gerunds (words ending in "ing"). Coupled with telling me the café also had a "bunch of twenty free" (that's "three") coffee flavours I could choose from, including "azelnut" (hazelnut), "toffehhh" (toffee) and "sawl-id caramel" (salted caramel). 

And according to the young lady, their toasties were "super good" and their tiramisu was "well good" (whatever that means). The over-usage of "super" is almost as irritating as the general destruction of the English language itself.

I was now waiting to be told that their tuna sandwiches were "professional" or that I should "go pro" for my salad, the "pro" bit being that which totally feckless marketers use to insult us for our many previous years purchasing mere "amateur" Oral-B products and overpriced "amateur" iPhones.

I appreciate that local dialects play a big part in how those of us not brought up in the particular area they are used, affect the way people speak. Losing something like a lovely Welsh lilt or an Edinburgh accent in favour of speaking like BBC presenters in the 1950’s would be a travesty. But my big question is why are teachers no longer pulling their charges up for not speaking English correctly? Correcting them for not pronouncing basic words properly being the main case in point. We used to have the dreaded wooden duster thrown at us back in the 70's if we dared to mispronounce a common word.

But this utter rubbish of “reaching out” is an effrontery to our angels of the sea, the volunteer RNLI member, who regularly has to “reach out” to drag stupid people from rubber swimming-pool dinghies who seem think it is OK for them to go paddling off-shore in a Force 7 sea gale. And a “ton of specials” would be far too heavy for the average café waitress to serve a customer. And a large group of people is just that, a "group" and not a “bunch”. Neither are numerous cows or sheep in a field a bunch. They are a herd. 

 Flowers are usually assembled together in a bunch.

People should be speaking English correctly, not like a member of the cast of EastEnders, all of whom seem intent on making English their second language, despite being born and bred here in the UK.

It is not “free fousand” it’s three thousand. And it’s not “Brih-ann”, it’s Britain. Even those 15-minute-of-fame seeking ingrates called celebrities can’t pronounce their own self-eulogised status correctly, pronouncing the word as “cel-eh-brih-ee”.

I’m sorry, but if they can’t speak correctly, and English is their first language, don’t give them free reign on the public airwaves.