Language is, and should be, a living thing, constantly enriched with new words and forms of expression. But there is avital distinction between good developments, which add to the language, enabling us to say things we could not say before, and bad developments, which subtract from the language by rendering it less precise. A vivacious, colorful use of words is not to be confused with mere slovenliness. The kind of slovenliness in which some professionals deliberately indulge is perhaps a kin to the cult ( 迷信) of the unfinished work, which has eroded most of the arts in our time. And the true answer to it is the same that art is enhanced, not hindered, by discipline. You cannot carve satisfactorily in butter. The corruption of written English has been accompanied by an even sharper decline in the standard of spoken English. We speak very much less well than was common among educated Englishmen a generation or two ago. The modem theatre has played a baneful (有害的) part in dimming our appreciation of language. Instead of the immensely articulate dialogue of, for example, Shaw (who was also very insistent on good pronunciation), audiences are now subjected to streams of barely literatetrivia, often designed, only too well, to exhibit' lack of communication', and larded (夹杂) with the obscenities(下流的话) and grammatical errors of the intellectually impoverished. Emily Post once advised her readers: "The theatre is the best possible place to hear correctly-enunciated speech. " Alas, one young actress, was recently reported to be taking lessons in how to speak badly, so that she should fit in better. But the BBC is the worst traitor. After years of very successfully helping to raise the general standard of spoken English, it suddenly went into reverse. As the head of the Pronunciation Unit coyly (含蓄地) put it,"In the1960s the BBC opened the field to a much wider range of speakers." To hear a BBC disc jockey talking to the latest ape-like popidol is a truly shocking experience of verbal squalor. And the prospect seems to be of even worse to come. School teachers are actively encouraged to ignore little Johnny's incoherent grammar, atrocious spelling and haphazard punctuation, because worrying about such things might inhibit his creativegenius.