Who isn't annoyed by bad English?

Reading today’s (9.8.10) Education Guide in The Monitor, I could not hide my delight that there is at least one person who feels like me. Some of the people close to me know how much I have been concerned about the English today’s future leaders speak, write or use to communicate. I was never the best English student at school, but even I find some of the English used inexcusable so much that sometimes I have had to engage the offenders, to their surprise and irritation.
As a person completing my fourth decade on this scenic planet, I am probably from prehistory. I spell the same way in emails, FB, documents, and text messages. It's not that much extra work, as many of today’s indolent young citizens would want us to believe. I hear it is a sign of progress to come up with new words or completely write them in a different way, but I think there is a difference between inventing words and adulterating those that have been in existence for years. The youths especially have mastered the art of butchering the Queen’s language under the guise of sms lingo and being in the modern age. Like the writer in the Monitor article contends, it is not easy to point to one particular cause for this hopeless situation, because everything in this country has changed. From poor schools only intent on seeing students pass to the advent of the Internet, any thing can be responsible. It is fairly acceptable to say that there is a general lack of interest in reading by today’s generation. One of my lads recently told me that he finds it hard to read a book or anything for more than five minutes especially if there is no exam or test to do after reading that material. Where as it is true that there is a deficiency in interest, it has to be mentioned that the quality of what is available to be read is also appalling. I remember being encouraged to read newspapers to improve my English. I lost count of the number of times, I was referred to the Weekly Topic to improve my English and boy it was some form of English inside the pages of that paper. I am not sure I can say the same about the paper associated with it as a remnant.
I don’t know if it is today’s university products that have caused the standard of English by journalists to go down or the other way round – it is a case of the chicken and the egg. Gone are the days of journalists being the fountains of honour when it comes to the English language. You can't tell your children to listen to the radio or read a newspaper to learn how to speak good English anymore. The news on TV, especially from those reporting from the 'field' with no scripts, makes you want to cry. Our poor Ugandan English accent not withstanding, I have been horrified by some of the pronunciations I hear on TV and radio. One very popular daily in this land of matooke makes the same spelling mistakes, arbitrarily truncated stories and regularly misspells names of places that I could spell correctly when I was 8 years old.
Writing and speaking correctly (especially in English) is increasingly becoming optional as evidenced by the rate at which people’s application letters find themselves in my office waste bin. Nothing hurts like reading badly written English, but it hurts even more when the author is a person seeking employment from you.