Recently I was teaching a lesson to a group of intermediate-level 10th graders. The students and I get on very well – they are bright and funny, which is a terrific combination – and they are good enough at English to have plenty of opinions about the way the language is used. We were checking the answers to some practice exercises on question tags. None of them had any problems with it – they had figured out how to use question tags correctly and could do it pretty well – they just thought that the question-tag mechanism in English was unnecessarily cumbersome.

“Why do you need all these different question tags? Couldn’t you think of a simpler way to do it?” one of them asked, as if I had personally been on the committee that had devised the question-tag rule.

As a group they’re pretty good about remembering to let me know whenever something annoys them about English grammar, and I do my best to commiserate with them on those occasions. There have been some low points (the units on the present perfect continuous and future continuous spring to mind) but we always manage to get through with a smile.

So, I conceded straight away that the Hungarian way of forming question tags is – ugye? – a whole lot simpler and more straightforward than the English way, but praised them for being able to handle English question tags so well. As an interesting aside, I pointed out that many young people in the UK have taken to using innit? as an all-purpose question tag themselves. Naturally, I stressed that this was incorrect and that they should use question tags the proper way.

Anyway, this afternoon I sat down to correct a pile of tests, including one lot done by my intermediate 10th graders. A huge smile spread across my face when I got to the section of the test on question tags. Here’s why:

 

I’m going to give the guy who wrote it bonus points, of course 🙂

As for innit, it will be interesting to see what happens over the next few decades. There’s no denying that some teenagers in the UK use it all the time, especially – but not exclusively – to antagonise teachers and parents, in a sense proving that even though innit itself may be gramatically incorrect, the circumstances of its use are nevertheless heroically authentic. Will it ever become an example of acceptable usage? Time will tell, innit?