patricianhighschool

Teachers: B Sweeney, S Nestor, P Martin, E Murphy, D Kiely

Friday Febuary 6th - St Arnold's First Years Lobby Dunnes Stores in the name of GRAMMAR

Below is the full text of a letter sent Dunnes Stores Head Office on behalf of St Arnold's English class. Any reply received will also be posted on this page.



Patrician High School,
Carrickmacross,
Co. Monaghan

3 January 2009

The Manager,
Dunnes Stores Head Office,
46-50 South Great George St.
Dublin 2

Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing on behalf of St. Arnold’s First Year English Class, Patrician High School, Carrickmacross. We are writing to request that you alter the signs over your express checkouts to ones that are grammatically correct.

We have been learning about nouns, countable nouns and uncountable nouns. Countable nouns are nouns that can be counted, like chairs. You can have one chair, two chairs, three chairs, four chairs. Uncountable nouns are nouns that cannot be counted, like water or information. You cannot say one water, two waters, three waters, four waters. For uncountable nouns you use ‘less’ and for countable nouns you use ‘fewer’. Your signs read ‘8 items or less’ but as shopping items are countable it should read ‘8 items or fewer’. This was brought to our attention by another pupil. Your ‘8 items or less’ is against all rules of grammar.

The last time we checked your motto was ‘The difference is we’re Irish’. We just do not understand why you would deliberately mis-educate the youth of Ireland with this grammatical error. We understand that this is not a life or death situation but it is very easy to correct this mistake. We are sure that it would not cost too much to change and even if it did you should put ‘fewer’ on all new signs. You surely would not deliberately put the incorrect word on the signs when you now know the correct one. After all it is as easy to put the right word on the signs as the wrong word.

We feel strongly about this matter. We have no intention of continuing to support a supermarket that would deliberately go against what we learn in school about the importance of grammar. Without grammar the whole language would fall apart. We will publish this letter on our school website for all of our community to see. However we would also be pleased to publish your reply, which will hopefully be a positive one.

In fact, we feel this could be a very positive experience for all of us. It would be excellent free publicity for your store and it would prove that you really care about the youth of Ireland. We would certainly put the story in our local newspaper and we are sure a move like this could make national news.

We want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter and we would greatly appreciate a prompt reply. We have put a lot of work and effort into this and it would be fantastic to receive a positive reply from a supermarket chain like Dunnes Stores.

Yours faithfully,
St. Arnold’s First Year English class.

First Year St Arnold's Stormbreaker Artwork. Click for bigger picture.