English teachers are often cast as pedantic grammar police, silently correcting everyone around them. But what if our role is not to police language, but to notice it? Continuing the NATE Language Working Group blogs for 2026, Steve Collins explores grammar gripes, hypercorrection and “misfiring register”, and argues for a more curious, descriptivist approach to the language we hear every day.

A few years ago, my Year Thirteen A-level Language students pooled together and bought me some lovely leaving gifts, amongst which was a mug with the slogan:

I’m silently correcting your grammar.

I loved it and I used it, until the slogan transfer started disintegrating and eventually disappeared after many cycles in the dishwasher. I know my students meant it in jest. After all, we had spent a lot of time on the subject of language use, language diversity and language varieties. And as their English Language A-level teacher, it was my job to enable students to understand how language works, how it’s used by different groups of people, and how to react when people — including perhaps not terribly well-informed people — say daft things about language.

It did make me think, though: wasn’t this mug message just reinforcing the stereotype of the English teacher as pedantic stickler, whose job it is to make people use language ‘correctly’? After all, colleagues do collar me in the staff room to ask me if something is right or wrong, or joke that they have to ‘mind their p’s and q’s’ whenever I’m in earshot, presumably so as to avoid me ‘silently correcting their grammar’.

If we were to believe some of the people in the media, the English language is disintegrating and fading away, a bit like the transfer on the mug, and it’s often been said that it’s our fault. That schools aren’t doing enough to make students speak properly. Only recently, the novelist Louis de Bernieres was tearing what is left of his hair out about the overuse of the word like, labelling it ‘junk speak’, and ‘verbal littering’*. I’m actually thankful for de Bernières and co., as we English teachers find a rich vein of articles in the national press, for our students to lay into. And any of my former A-level students would have been able to point out that one of the very useful roles of the word like is that it’s a filler, used when the brain is pausing and formulating its next utterance.

At A-level, students learn that there are two fundamentally different ways of looking at language: the descriptivist approach and the prescriptivist one. The former approach involves describing what is going on when someone uses words like like or lol or low-key. We don’t berate speakers for their use; we explain why they are used, by whom and to whom. Linguists and sociolinguists have studied language painstakingly for years, they have conducted research, and they have letters after their name to prove it. They generally know what they are talking about.

And then there are the prescriptivists: in this group are journalists like John Humphrys, Simon Heffer and Harry Mount; these are demonstrably clever and successful people, whether you agree with their points of view or not. But quite frankly, when it comes to language, they are not speaking from a position of any particular technical expertise or disciplinary knowledge: they just happen to have strong opinions about it. Psychologist Steven Pinker calls these self-appointed experts ‘language mavens’, and they have been around for about as long as we have been putting words on paper, or using them to speak to each other. My rule of thumb is, if someone has studied whatever they have studied academically, and published rigorously peer-reviewed papers, I’m more inclined to trust them. At the same time, while I am inclined to trust (or at the very least, take seriously) what Noam Chomsky says about Universal Grammar, I wouldn’t necessarily give any particular credence to what he says about American foreign policy.

However, we all have our prejudices and I include myself here. I can start getting hot under the collar, silently correcting my colleagues’ grammar when they make announcements in the staff room:

‘If any Year Eight form tutors have any questions about the forthcoming trip to Marwell Zoo, speak to Miss Callaghan or myself. ‘

The use of the reflexive pronoun here, as you undoubtedly know, because you’re all English teachers, is not quite right, or should I say is inappropriate. The reflexive pronoun is unnecessary here — this biology teacher should have just stuck with the object pronoun, ‘me’. According to the online Cambridge Dictionary, the reflexive pronoun is used when the speaker wants to refer ‘back to the subject forms of personal pronouns’. I have adapted their example:

I didn’t decorate it myself. Someone else did it for me.

The ‘misuse’ of the reflexive pronoun came up again during a recent series of The Traitors, when one contestant said at the Round Table, ‘Johnny, it’s yourself, mate.’

The Traitors reflexive pronoun caused a flurry of interest and despair on forums like Mumsnet and Reddit, and even reached the heady heights of Radio 4’s cultural chat show Loose Ends. What was even more interesting was that moments later, the same contestant used the reflexive pronoun ‘correctly’: ‘you close yourself in. You’re putting yourself on the line.’

Why did he say, ‘it’s yourself, mate.’ Was he attempting to soften the blow and create emotional distance? Was he trying to sound more serious? And why did it catch on, so that other contestants used it in the same way?*

Now, one linguistic term we can use to describe when someone opts to use one grammatical feature over another, in order to sound more serious, more official, more polite, but gets it wrong, is ‘hypercorrection’. I also like the label I saw recently online: ‘try-hard posh’. It’s when a speaker wants to sound super-polite, when in fact, the English language doesn’t require them to: ‘speak to me’, or ‘I’m voting for you’, is fine. Better than fine, it’s ‘right’!

In Why do Linguistics (2023), Fiona English and Tim Marr explore the idea of hyper-correction in some detail, using as their first example a recorded message at Holloway Road tube station, which announces, almost as if God were talking to Moses:

‘The lift on the left shall be the next lift [to depart]’.

Fiona English calls this phenomenon ‘misfiring register’, not getting it quite right, which is sometimes hilarious, but often just plain irritating. When describing language though, we often don’t like to say that something is ‘incorrect’, or just plain wrong. 

But we all still have our petty prejudices and that, I think, is ok. I have another bugbear. For instance, whenever a child, or indeed a colleague, says:

‘Please may you give me a pen//remember to complete your register’.

I reach mentally for my red pen. I silently correct their grammar.

It’s another attempt to sound polite. ‘Can’ perhaps seems too direct, too bossy – but that’s what we say, at least for now. And I have tried to explain to students that it’s not necessary to use ‘may’. ‘Can’ works just fine. But they rarely listen, so I have decided to suck it up. Most of the time.

I have learnt that a better approach is to open up a discussion about it. Why did you say that? What were you thinking? Where did you learn that? In our book Language Awareness at School (2023), this is the approach we take. We promote the idea that language, whoever uses it, whenever they use it, from the canteen staff to the Head Teacher, from the Year Seven student on his first day to the Year Thirteen School Captain delivering a speech, is worthy of study.

From the utterances in the staff room to the signs on the doors, language is to be noticed, not necessarily ‘corrected’, but discussed and analysed and commented on. Perhaps then, we English teachers won’t be treated as pedantic sticklers, but as people who embrace language in all its forms.

*This is (another interesting feature of how we use language: we start using/misusing a word or a phrase, and before you know it, everyone is doing it. There’s a name for it – Random Fluctuation Theory -, but that’s for another blog).

Further Reading

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/13/the-hill-i-will-die-on-like-imprecise-redundant-speech-junk-food-britain
• English, F. & Marr, T (2023). Why do Linguistics? Reflective Linguistics and the Study of Language. London: Bloomsbury.
• Marr, T., & Collins, S. (2023). Language Awareness at School: A Practical Guide for Teachers and School Leaders. London: Routledge.
• Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates the Gift of Language. New York: William Morrow.