Tongue-tied.

The buzz word of the week is NEET, yet another social stereotype which depicts a collection of the country’s youngsters who, according to the Government, have no interest in, well anything really.

But aside from this, an equally shocking statistic has come to light. As highlighted in The Guardian on Monday, the number of teenagers choosing to take a GCSE in a Modern Foreign Language has dropped from 80% to a frightening 48% since Labour came to power.

Is anyone surprised by this? Surely not. What would you rather do, painstakingly chant your way through the verb “to be” in a terrible German accent or create your own music video, set up a company selling nipple piercings or roll around the school hall simulating murder whilst lit by a strobe? The creation of the “studies” and “ologies” is leading people down the garden path and away from “old school” subjects such as the classics and modern languages.

Now I am neither condoning nor criticising this genre of “new” subjects. Far from it. At school, I had a ball dressing up in a catsuit, face painted half white, half black, rocking back and forth moaning on the floor in yet another play about teenage angst. What I’m saying is that I also made damn sure I could order more than a luke warm cerveza in a Spanish karaoke bar and a kilo de tomates in a quaint French grocery store.

There are few things that make my half-Spanish, half-Welsh blood boil more than a lobster-hued English tourist vociferously demanding “Egg ‘n chips love” across Europe. Perhaps one of the few things that can top it is the oft repeated mantra of an ignorant happy-clappy holiday-maker, “Well who needs to learn a foreign language when everyone else in the world speaks English.”

Firstly, this wildly presumptuous claim is utterly erroneous. Secondly, even if this totally egotistical statement were true, why does that mean that we shouldn’t make the effort to converse in Portuguese or Polish, French or Finnish? As a nation we have become shamelessly slothful when it comes to giving our brains a little linguistic workout. And businesses across the land are desperate for languages. Fact. Not only is learning a foreign language an excellent form of mental gymnastics, but also opens up a wealth of golden opportunities, studying and working abroad included.

In fact, it may just be that part of the reason that there have been no developments in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann are precisely because none of the British reporters on scene even speak Portuguese. Journalists frequently rely on slap-dash translations and are prevented from developing possible leaks and forging their own precious contacts due to linguistic ignorance.

But of course encouraging students to study languages is not made any easier by the frustrating scenario faced by many a Brit, sitting pretty in a delightful little French creperie excited about their super-sized galette, when the waiter hands them an English menu (inevitably hysterically translated) and insists on taking notes in a pidgin version of your mother tongue.

The truth is that we have stolen so many words from our foreign friends that barely a sentence goes by without a spattering of exotic words to liven our otherwise banal parlance. Imagine the scenario. After being plagued by an extraordinary sense of déjà-vu, Sally sets up a rendez-vous and subsequently engages in an über-intense tête à tête with her closest friend about how she dreamt her husband had a rather small wiener. In order to calm her nerves, her friend offers her a ham baguette and a cappuccino and suggests she has a little siesta. Touché. She has almost overcome her sense of shock when she realises she is peckish, the oven is kaput and so dashes out for a quick buffet of tapas. Well, c’est la vie.

By studying the language of another country, we learn about their culture, their history and inevitably become far more open-minded and welcoming of other peoples across the globe. Not only that, but whack a couple of delicate French phrases into your otherwise rather flat sentences and suddenly you appear wonderfully sophisticated and frightfully erudite. Mais oui.

People may feel complete bumbling along in their Anglo-Saxon sphere, listening to British pop music, drinking British lager, cursing British government and lauding British weather. But for inquiring minds and an unquenched thirst for knowledge, why not break free of this safe, and let’s face it, rather unappetising mould and hop across the Channel to cultures new and quash those all-too true accusations of English linguistic impotence.

The sky’s the limit.

I have a voice control problem. Twice, I have been told to turn down my volume when in the air, once by a fellow passenger and once by a trolley dolly. Imagine what would happen if I was allowed to take to the skies, with a telephonic device surgically attached. Well beware. By the start of next year, BMI Baby, Ryan Air and Air France fans may be able to do just that.

I’m a little confused. The Guardian has announced that Transport for London will soon be dishing out on the spot fines to anyone listening to Sean Kingston too loudly on their iPod (not that I would disagree with this particular sanity-preserving mechanism.) And yet the European Aviation Safety Agency are about to give free rein to an aeronautic soundtrack worthy of any glossy mag’s problem page.

Just imagine the mixture of banal and exasperating conversations flitting around the cabin, thousands of feet above ground level: the lovers’ tiff, the business man demanding steak for dinner on arrival, the nervous first-time flyer needing constant weather reports and the hormonal teen stressing about Saturday night’s outfit. Talk about disturbance.

Then you’d have the 34 year old IT-geek click, click, clicking away, playing Snake and desperately trying to beat his PB before the in-flight up-date. And what about the couple who have just met in departures over a Prêt à Manger sandwich and embark on a never-ending textathon throughout the journey? The Mile High Club would go techno, and phone sex would take to the skies.

The mixture of ring tones would be worse than that infamously infuriating cinema advert. Whizzing across time zones would ensure a relentless racket of tinny pop tunes and keyboard demos. And some Trigger Happy TV wannabe joker would inevitably impersonate the mobile phone scene midway across the Atlantic just as your sleeping pills are kicking in.

So would there be a “turn off to switch off” flight deck mantra? A silent mode policy enforced upon sky-high chatterboxes? If that were the case, I can just picture a 747 dangerously veering off course as a result of the manic vibrations of a cabin-full of cell phones.

When on a train, you can death-stare the babbling culprit into submission. Failing this, change carriage, or use your voice even louder. But frantically scanning the on-board safety instructions to fling open the escape exit and then desperately launching yourself into the serene skies is not quite as logistically possible.

And I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t sit too comfortably in my reclined, leather-upholstered window seat knowing that my idle mobile prattle could potentially cause signal failure, skew avionics, detonate bombs and possibly prompt a crash worthy of a Hollywood summer blockbuster. On this note, research published last year by the British Civil Aviation Authority found that mobile phone signals distort navigation bearing displays by up to five degrees. Now my maths is not great, but couldn’t that mean ending up in San Antonio instead of St Tropez.

I am slightly comforted, albeit somewhat bemused, to hear that earlier this month the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority ruled that it would not allow mobile calls on planes for the foreseeable future.

The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Starmer Smith has even gone so far as to launch a campaign against in-flight mobile use to preserve passengers’ safety and sanity when their heads are in the clouds. But in such a technologically infatuated world and one in which phone companies will be charging up to £2 a minute, I do not think that any number of right-wing intellectuals will be able to stop the surge for hell on board.

If this fearsome proposal goes ahead, the present tranquillity of cruising 30,000 feet above the ground will be ruthlessly shattered by the Mobile Phone Mafia. Catatonia may want to re-release her chart-topping hit, “It’s all over the front page, you give me air rage,” and the OED might be tempted to add an entry for it.

Never in the right.

What do Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Prince William all have in common? The same thing as Ronald Regan, George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton. They are all left-handed.

In fact, the list of successful lefties is endless. Michelangelo, Rafael and da Vinci were all members of this elite club. And what of two of the best loved cartoon characters the world has ever known, Kermit the Frog and Bart Simpson? Yup, you guessed it, both lefties. Jimmi Hendrix, Judy Garland, Einstein and Maradona. Ok, so Jack the Ripper was also left-handed, but then there’s always one.

For a while I had somehow managed to escape the previous torment, mental abuse and “cack-handed” jokes from those on the right side. Until Monday morning that is. My Pandora’s Box of painful memories was once again cruelly thrown open within the first minute of my first ever shorthand class. “It does not matter in the slightest that you are left-handed,” Mr Teeline cheerily chirped. Apart from the fact that I am totally incapable of using my elbow as an “anchor” whilst my forearm elegantly and effortlessly glides across the page, I moodily muttered. It was like being in Circle Time all over again, contorting my torso into ridiculous positions whilst sat at a right-sided tablet arm chair.

Unlike myself (left-handed just for writing) my sister is an unequivocal, unshakeable, unyielding purist of the leftie variety. Coming from a family where we were the only two left out, I would like to think that she copied me when it came to the handwriting. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the sense to make things a hell of a lot easier for herself by switching from the Dark Side for the rest of life’s tiresome little tasks. I used to giggle as she tried to cut out paper chains, cackle as she tried to peel a carrot and chuckle as she repeatedly smudged her inky letters (I curl my arm right around the world in order not to.)

But jokes aside, it seems that the world just simply isn’t built for us. Think scissors, fountain pens, doors, knives and my personal bugbears as a student, computer mice and highlighters. Oh, and did I mention the fact that according to scientists we are apparently at greater risk of developing breast cancer and psychotic mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Magic.

But then I wouldn’t have it any other way. Parents thought, and in some places still think that they are doing their children a favour by forcing their innocent left-handed kiddies to use the right hand. This infuriates me beyond belief and could, I think, be potentially very damaging. Would you take little Jonny’s brain out of his head and switch the two hemispheres over? Didn’t think so.

Luckily, slowly but surely the world is becoming increasingly aware of the needs and rights of left-handed people. In his article Left Out, Mark King of The Guardian proudly declares that he has created his own “lefty zone” at work and schools are finally doing more to provide necessary versions of tools. So I urge all you southpaws out there to stand up and shout “I shall not be left in the corner.” Ultimately, we may be frustrated, ridiculed, accident-prone, ink-smudged, RSI afflicted individuals, but our heart is in the left place.