I share my office with nice people. Some are the sort who I might consider socialising with, others, not so. Some are educated, others less so.

It’s a difficult situation, mixing people from different backgrounds, who have different levels of education and different roles to play in the organisation.

To précis this, in a less polite way, I’m utterly fed up of sharing an office with people who can’t speak English properly.

Every day, my ears are assaulted by the most abominable misuse of our native language, but not wanting to cause a scene, I conduct my rampages within the confines of my mind while I rock in my office chair. “I am in my happy place. I am in my happy place.”

I feel like screaming out “It’s YOU not YOUSE! There’s no such fucking word as YOUSE!”

You ‘could of’, could you? Could OF? It is could HAVE!

And ‘them things’, I think you’ll find are THOSE things.

He who, not ‘him that’, or even worse, ‘him what’.

The letter T is rarely silent and the currency we use, as you should know, is pounds, not quid.

What exactly does ‘he’s went’ mean? Please explain this.

I am sat.

I might have to get all passive aggressive on their arses and put up a poster, a laminated poster. Or even request that they take remedial lessons in spoken English. Or maybe employ a bag of marbles a la poor old ‘Enry ‘Iggins.

I don’t have much in the way of formal education in English, I couldn’t look at a sentence and tell you anything other than its basic components. I don’t know what past participles are or, jeez, I don’t even know much grammatical terminology at all, but I know the basics and I cringe when people speak so poorly.

Rampage, destroy, be awesome.

Listening to my six year old niece talk, I place the blame at the feet of the teachers who fail to correct the misuse of language in their young charges. They must hear the way kids speak and yet they clearly aren’t doing anything to teach them the rights and wrongs of grammar. I’m forever correcting her, as is her mum and the rest of the family, but unless it’s reinforced at school and amongst her peers, it’s never going to sink in and she’s going to grow up sounding like she’s as thick as pigshit too.

How have we got to this stage where people in responsible jobs can’t even speak the bloody language properly? Who interviews these people and gives them jobs? Well, basically, people who speak the same as they do. It makes my fucking blood boil.

From tomorrow, I’m going to start employing my white board to send subliminal messages via a “word of the day” feature. I shall start by introducing the thus far unheard of ‘those’. Or maybe I should just start talking to me colleagues the way I do to my niece.