Overestimating the British Public

A famous newspaper owner once said something to the effect that he would never go bankrupt by underestimating the intelligence of the British public.

A piece in the Guardian the other week took the opposite view. The author is a Polish journalist who is obviously intelligent, well-educated and has a good command of English. Unfortunately she has chosen to live in the UK where this combination of attributes makes her one of the minority.

The author is a bit snobby about the average British person whose vocabulary isn't as rich as hers and whose grammar isn't as accurate. I can sympathise with her to some extent; as she didn't go through the British school system she didn't learn the hard lessons about not showing off your knowledge to an unsympathetic audience.

It seems to me that her English teachers didn't advise on tuning her language to her target audience. I suspect that her teachers felt that accuracy was more important. I try to take a less lofty view with my classes and would point out elements of language which were grammatically correct but not used by, say, 99% of native speakers.

If she does persist in complaining about poor English among the native speakers, given Lynn Truss's success with "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" I wonder if there is an opening for a pedantic book on English usage written by a non-native speaker...