Spelling Matters
At a time when archaeological sites are being looted with unprecedented ferocity, it is pleasing to record that others are doing their best to keep the antiquities market free from looted artefacts. George Greenhaigh (84), his wife Olive (83) and his son Shaun (47) have recently been convicted in Britain for a string of forgeries that included a beautiful statuette of an Amarna princess which was sold to the Bolton Museum for a substantial sum of money.
Alas, the trio became over-confident. So long as they confined themselves to art, where style and authenticity were a matter of expert opinion - and art experts are notoriously inept at spotting forgeries - they were safe, and a long list of items sold to various museums and dealers over at least 17 years bears witness to their success.
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| This is one of the forged Assyrian reliefs attributed to the Greenhaigh family. |
Their downfall came when they forged a trio of Assyrian reliefs, complete with inscriptions. I have not been able to discover which of the three was responsible for them, but he (or she) must have been fairly confident of his abilities, for he (or she) didn't just copy genuine inscriptions but actualy created new texts!
Unfortunately the British school system - and no doubt that of other countries as well - has adopted the "spelling doesn't matter, it's the meaning that counts" philosophy, with the result that we are afflicted with a generation of yahoos who constantly confuse "there", "their" and "they're", who cannot tell the difference between "its" and "it's", and whose ideas of punctuation are as erratic as the flight of a bat in pursuit of a particularly evasive moth.
The Greenhaigh family appear to have applied this same philosophy to their Akkadian, and the forged reliefs contained several misspellings.
I am happy to say that there are those who care about spelling, punctuation and grammar, both in English and in Assyrian. Though we appear to be fighting a losing battle in the struggle to keep the oiks out of English writing, the experts reading these wonderful new inscriptions were pulled up short by the glaring errors and phoned the police.
Fortunately - or unfortunately - although in these unenlightened times it is not yet a crime to write "their" when you mean "there", the police do take an interest in similar behaviour when the language is sufficiently old. The Greenhaighs were arrested and Shaun has been given 4 years and 8 months, his mother a suspended 12 months and his father is still to be sentenced.
Now, if only we could persuade judges to take a similarly harsh view of those who put an apostrophe in the plural, we might begin to make progress in the campaign to keep English correct.
KKD
