Coronavirus: the Immortals have spoken

Académie Française
Preserving a legacy. If necessary, in aspic

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.”

“Don’t chew with your mouth open.”

“Use the right spoon.”

Ah, the making of the middle class. All those rules. All those do’s and don’ts.

With rather more don’ts than do’s, of course.

And in language too. Never start a sentence, let alone a paragraph, with a conjunction. Never split an infinitive, a stricture I’m trying hard to learn to finally stop being ruled by. Oh, and never end sentences with prepositions, of course.

I’ve recently been listening to an American linguist, John McWhorter. He points out how little sense many of these rules make and how they vanish in time anyway.

For instance, in German today, ‘there’ isn’t the same in ‘stay there’ (‘bleib dort’) and ‘go there’ (‘geh dorthin’). That distinction, between ‘dort’ and ‘dorthin’, used to exist in English too, between ‘there’ and ‘thither’.

“I want to go there,” infant tells mother.

“Now, my dear,” replies mother, “you know that should be ‘go thither’.”

Yes, well, it wouldn’t happen now, would it? But I bet late Renaissance parents would have said something like that, as they tried to make their kids speak English proper, like.

Why do these things vanish? Chiefly, McWhorter claims, when many people start learning the language as adults. Up to the age of twelve or fourteen, children have a capacity to master a language with all its weird peculiarities; beyond that age, they lose it. Imagine foreigners arriving in England and having to learn the language. Viking invaders, say, who settled, ‘married’ local women (the quotation marks are because such arrangements weren’t always consensual) and realised they had to speak English if they wanted to communicate with their kids or most of the people around them.

“Runnest? Runneth? You expect me to learn to say that? Screw that for a game of soldiers. If you insist I’ll add an ‘s’ in the third person singular, though beats me why I bother, but all the rest will just be ‘run’. OK, pal? Happy with that? If not, just remember which one of us came in awe-inspiring boats sweeping across the North Sea, with a bunch of the most fearsome warriors of the Middle Ages. With fire and sword to make it clear to you that we were staying. Come to think of it, I’ve still got the old battle axe somewhere. Should I fetch it? Ah, now you see the sense in the way I conjugate verbs. Good man. Sensible fellow.”

A good basis for protecting middle-class values: use the right spoon

And in German, the basis for a little gender conflict too

One of the niceties of language that vanished from English over those centuries was grammatical gender. As McWhorter points out, it’s somewhat laughable that German treats spoons as masculine, knives as neutral and forks as feminine. I challenge any German to provide a logical reason for the distinction. What, items of cutlery might have gender clashes?

English has done away with all but biological gender. Houses, truth, postboxes, knives, forks and spoons are all genderless. One less useless thing to learn…

But Old English, as a good Germanic language, did have grammatical gender. I’m sure rigid grammarians tried to get speakers of the language to remember the gender of lots of nouns for genderless things. The Vikings, speakers of Old Norse which had its own somewhat different genders, basically couldn’t be bothered to learn a new system and discarded it.

All this to show that languages change. The rigid rules are senseless. Eventually, they go.

But in French, they don’t go easily. A valiant rearguard action will always be put up to prevent their loss. And there’s a prestigious national institution to lead the fight.

It’s called the Académie Française. It was founded by the Cardinal Richelieu who gave the Three Musketeers such a bad time. Its forty members are so important they’re referred to as the ‘Immortals’. My father liked to quote a film I’ve never been able to track down, in which a character is elected to the Academy and, gazing at his reflection in his new uniform, declares “me voilà donc immortel jusqu’à la fin de mes jours” – “so here I am, immortal until the end of my days”.

The Academy issues regular decrees on the French language to ensure that it isn’t allowed to decline into ignominious pauperisation or, as the rest of like to say, change. If it means mummifying the language or preserving it in aspic, then they’re the ones to do it.

Years ago, they announced the verb for to land, ‘atterrir’, literally to come to earth, could be used for the moon too, so you didn’t have to say ‘alunir’, to come to the moon.

Though you could.

Similarly, an ‘Alpiniste’ could go climbing in mountain ranges other than the Alps. You weren’t an ‘Himalayiste’ or ‘Caucasiniste’ depending on which mountains you tackled.

The Immortals have issued a decree on the Coronavirus related disease. It is permissible to refer to it as ‘Covid’, even in French. But it’s important to understand the word’s feminine. Apparently, too many French people have been treating it as masculine, as with most loan words from English. Think of those quintessentially French terms such as ‘le parking’, ‘le brownie’ or ‘le weekend’, where the form ‘le’ for ‘the’ is masculine.

So why is Covid feminine? Because the gender of a compound term, and Covid is a compound of ‘Corona’, ‘Virus’ and ‘Disease’, takes its gender from the principal component. And that principal term, according to the 7 May issue of the Academy’s ‘Dire, ne pas dire’ (‘Say, don’t say’) collection, is the word ‘disease’. Disease in French is ‘la maladie’, where ‘la’ is feminine. 

So the whole term must also be feminine.

La Covid, then, not le. The Immortals have pronounced.

Vive la France, I say. Vive le français too, come to that. But I’m so relieved those Vikings decided they couldn’t be bothered to learn Old English grammatical gender.

Travelling with a storyteller on a night train from revolution

If I remember, I had to run for the train. Miss it and I’d be travelling through the night, or waiting until the following day. This train would get me there after midnight, but at least well before breakfast time.

I was heading for Hull, in Yorkshire, from London. If I was late, it was probably because this was the time, forty years ago, when I was heavily involved in activism for the far left, and I’d been busy forwarding the revolution. A revolution which, in case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t happen despite my efforts. I was convinced it would, but in a top-down Cult, you can convince yourself of anything.

It was a time when I read quite a few books of Lenin’s. I remember almost nothing about them, just that they were stiflingly boring but had sonorous titles.

Far from difficult to put down
And eminently forgettable

One title I liked was The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Few people today have any idea who Mr Kautsky was, and fewer would feel it worth spending thirty seconds on Wikipedia to find out. But Lenin wrote ponderously against him, itself a characteristic of the hard Left: it spends far more time denouncing its ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’ than its enemies.

When it comes to wiping those backsliders out, I reckon a cruel but effective method would have been to start reading them Lenin’s works. They’d be begging for the firing squad in no time at all. Or at least for a pen to sign any confession put in front of them.

Another title that sticks in my memory is Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. I remember not a word of the contents, but the title remains relevant today: there is something infantile about the far Left, to which I then belonged. But, like St Paul, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then, however, I saw things as through a mirror darkly, and felt sure, as do so many today who should know far better, that wishing for change yourself was enough to make it happen.

I was on my way to Hull to see a fellow wishful-thinker of the Left. However, since she was also my girlfriend at the time, I don’t think the activity for which we were getting together was exclusively the advancing of socialism. Which was another reason, I suspect, why I was anxious to get there before tonight had become irretrievably tomorrow morning.

In my hurry, I’d taken no reading material with me. Not even Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which wouldn’t have been the best way of passing the time on the journey (what on earth does the title mean, anyway?), but might have been better than just looking out of the window. Fortunately, a fellow passenger in my compartment took pity on me.

“I’ve just bought two books. You can read this one, if you like.”

Practically impossible to put down
and far more memorable than Lenin

It was Nevil Shute’s The Chequerboard. I’d never read any Shute before. I’d probably never even heard of him. But within minutes, I’d fallen for the story and simply couldn’t put it down. In fact, handing the book to the generous passenger when he left the train, was a painful experience. It took me a while – well, I had a revolution to organise and more Lenin to read – but within a few months I found the time to pop into a bookshop and buy a copy of the book, to finish it.

The thing about Shute is that whatever you think of his writing, he was an extraordinary storyteller. And in The Chequerboard he gives that skill plenty of scope: as well as the protagonist’s own story, the framework for the novel, we get the stories of the three men he sets out to track down. They’re finely constructed, compelling tales, a pleasure to read at any time, especially in a train running through the featureless landscape of night-time England.

The kindness of the stranger in my compartment is a memory I treasure. So is my pleasure in reading Shute. I’ve consumed a great many of his novels since then, and re-read several of them many times, though none so much as The Chequerboard.

My daughter-in-law Sheena, knows how much I like the book. She also knows that I’m working to improve my Spanish. So, when she saw a copy of Tablero de Damas, the 1951 Spanish translation, she snapped it up for me.

Found for me by Sheena in Madrid
where she lives with my son and new granddaughter

As she says, there’s something to be said for reading a book you already know, in a language you’re trying to learn: you don’t have to struggle to understand the story and can concentrate on the words. Since they’ve been written by a native Spanish speaker, I’m sure they’re good enough to help me with the language.

Although what gives reading the book additional spice is seeing how awful the translation is: librero (bookseller), for instance, for ‘bookmaker’ (someone who takes bets, for instance on horse races), of ‘cutting corns’ (removing calluses of dead skin) rendered as selling agricultural products.

But that just makes re-reading the book all the more fun. As does the memory of the strange times, and the kind circumstances, in which I read it for the first time. Especially as it was so much more entertaining than my usual reading.

Thank you, Sheena. Thank you, Spanish translator. Thank you, stranger on a train.

And thank you, of course, Nevil Shute.

While we wait we hope, or a window into another culture

“While I breathe, I hope,” the Romans used to say. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Hope springs eternal in the human breast, to use the English expression that means more or less the same thing. Or while there’s life there’s hope.

Waiting. And hoping. At least to be seen

In Spanish, the word “esperar” means both “to wait” and “to hope”. As though you can only wait in hope. Which seems reasonable. After all, why would you bother to wait at all, if not in hope of its yielding something?

Come to think of it, I can see a marketing slogan in there somewhere. “We give you hope – while u wait”. For any reasonable level of royalty, I’m happy to provide that to one of those weird new churches that keep popping over across the US.

But “esperar” isn’t the only Spanish word that has enchanted me recently.

“Destino” is another, with its double meaning of destination and destiny. You’ve got to admit that its quite attractive to get to where you’re going and realise you didn’t just plan to go there, you were fated to.

We’ve been having work done on a bathroom recently, and inevitably required the help of what the Spanish call a “fountaineer”, a “fontanero”. In English, that’s just a plumber, but doesn’t that seem horribly prosaic compared to someone who specialises in fountains?

One of the standard tools used by a fountaineer and, come to that, by any other handy man or man less handy, like me, is a “destorniallador”. A “tornillo” is a screw, so a “destornillador” is the tool that allows you to remove a screw. The Spanish seem more concerned with removing the things than with putting them in. Which is curious, since you can’t unscrew anything you haven’t already screwed up. 

Although, to be fair, there are also screwups you can’t fix with a screwdriver.

In English, it’s the opposite: you use a screwdriver to drive a screw into position, with never a care as to how to get it out again afterwards.

The French are much more logical about the naming of this instrument. A “tournevis” is, as its name implies, a tool for turning a “vis” or screw. Which way you turn it depends on you and the circumstances.

Sometimes the Spanish can be hopelessly complicated. What we call simply a “postman”, and the French a “facteur”, they call a “distributor of mail” or “repartidor de correos”. What a mouthful for such a simple notion…

Another great recent discovery was a word which sounded, to me, like “fiery”. It was something we were asked for as work was finishing on some tiles. “Fiery?” we asked.

It seems they were after some detergent. “Liquido detergente” it’s called, which again is a mouthful. Hence the shortened term, pronounced “fiery’ but spelled “fairy”, as in Fairy Liquid, the renowned dishwashing product.

Ah, well. One of the delights of being an immigrant in a new country is learning a little about its language. All the more delightful because it isn’t just a matter of different words. It’s also a matter of seeing things in a different way.

Not just a new language then, but a new culture too.

Forgetfulness of things past

The thing about Tweed is that it never goes out of fashion. Of course, you might think that was because it was never in fashion in the first place but, hey, that doesn’t make the statement any less true.

I’m deeply attached to my fine, old Tweed jacket.

I say old because it is old but, to be fair, it was probably old when it was new.

And by “attached” I don’t mean I’m sufficiently fond of it to wear it. Every year or so I go through my wardrobe picking the clothes I never wear and chucking them out. Or rather, this being England where the only thing in constant growth is poverty, not chucking them but recycling them through a charity shop.

Each time I carry out this culling exercise, I come across the tweed jacket and I think, “I shouldn’t get rid of that one. I should wear it a bit more”. It’s a thought that comes with a pang of guilt, since each time I realise that I haven’t worn it, even once, since the last time. It continues to hang in my wardrobe, seemingly immoveable because I’m no more prepared to part with it than I am to put it on.

Today I was preparing an expense claim and realised I’d mislaid a train ticket. Whenever this happens – and, alas, it happens more often than I like – I always check through the breast pockets of all my jackets, since that’s an obvious place to stuff a ticket which you’re going to need at a barrier in a short time.

What prompted me to look in the tweed jacket I can’t imagine. There was no chance the missing ticket would be in a garment I hadn’t put on for years. But what I did find was something even better, a discovery that opened a door to a trip down Memory Lane. Except in my case Forgetfulness Lane is far more apt.

I found two boarding card stubs (remember when airlines used to have those? Before you could use a phone?) They were for a flight from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Barcelona, one 12 November. The outward flight was at 7:30 am.

The last time I lived close enough to the airport at Roissy to catch a plane there at 7:30 was 1998. We’re talking about a trip that happened up to two decades ago (you might spot the fact that my seat was in the ‘no-smoking cabin’ which certainly dates things a bit).

The trigger for a flood of memories.
Or in my case none at all

Sadly, I have no memory of the trip at all. Which seems a pity, since Barcelona is one of my favourite cities.

Was it the 7:30 start? In November? Maybe it was sheer trauma that led to my memory failure. A kind of act of mercy by my psyche. Particularly as I notice from the return stub that I flew back the same day, on the flight that left just before 6:00. I can only have had about six hours in the city itself, making it an experience to bury rather than relive.

What can have possessed me to wear tweed to Barcelona? It’s true that it’s cold in November. Even so, the Spaniards dress so well. Was I trying to make a point of my Englishness, it being a profoundly English tradition to wear that quintessentially Scottish cloth?

Lots of fascinating questions. Speculating on the answers is almost as pleasurable as reliving the lost past. It’s a kind of non-nostalgia.

For Proust, it was the taste of a Madeleine cake. For me, it was the rough feel of tweed. Of course, for Proust the experience triggered an avalanche of remembrance of things past. In mine, it merely reminded me of my forgetfulness.

Where I have the edge over Proust, though, is in my succinctness. He used a million and a quarter words on recreating his memories. I’ve taken fewer than 700 on the failure of mine. 

A small mercy, dear reader, to be thankful for.

Miscommunication

He seemed bright, alert and attentive, the young man in front of me.

Part of my mind was less concerned with my reason for being in the supermarket or the information he was failing to give me, but with the voice and accent in which he was failing to give it to me. When I was young, a man of African or Caribbean appearance would be most likely to talk with a strong West Indian accent (which was hardly surprising, since he was highly likely to be from that part of the world).

These days, however, if his accent is foreign, it’s usually Nigerian (also unsurprising since he’s most likely to be from that great West African nation).

This young man spoke with a perfect English accent. Which was equally unsurprising, because he was clearly entirely English.

However, my passing thoughts on the extent of assimilation of the Caribbean community into mainstream British society, satisfying though they were in themselves, had to take second place to my more immediate supermarket needs. He was an employee, though his obvious intelligence led me to suspect on a temporary basis while preparing or pursuing a course of advanced study, but despite his intellectual abilities and the fact that we spoke the same language, at every level both literal and metaphorical, we were manifestly failing to communicate.

“You want pet supplies?” he checked with me.

“Yes. You know. Pet food. And such like.” 

I was slightly irritated at myself for the reticence to state why I was there – to buy some pooper scoopers. It was a pleasant day, full of light and unseasonably mild. It was an upmarket shop. Did I feel that any allusion, however peripheral, to excrement was out of place in those circumstances?

“Pet food?”

Was he being deliberately obtuse? I was beginning to lose patience.

“Yes. Pet food. Perhaps this branch doesn’t stock any?”

He smiled at me. With, I felt, a slight touch of incredulity. Was he making fun of me?

“What kind of pet food are you after?”

He seemed to be slowing his diction, as though I needed to be talked down to, as though I was slow in understanding and had to be patronised. By this stage I was beginning to get seriously irritated. He seemed such a pleasant young man but I could see no justification for this kind of behaviour.

“Any kind of pet food would do,” I replied with what I hoped was a sufficient level of brusque haughtiness. Or possibly haughty brusqueness. But I felt either would do.

He didn’t reply but merely looked at me with what struck me as little short of pity. It was bordering on the offensive.

But then, suddenly, a nasty thought came to me. With some dread, I turned slowly to look behind me. And my fears were confirmed. Stretching each way, as far as the eye could see were shelf after shelf of cat food, dog food, probably hamster and rabbit food, sanitary materials for cats or for dogs, leads, bowls, brushes, whatever you might desire in that line, including, inevitably, pooper scoopers.

Ah, the shame, the shame. The sheer embarrassment

“Ah,” I said, “I see.”

As a reply, it was, I must admit, inadequate. It lacked the verve and wit I like to convince myself I cultivate.

“I’m sorry,” I added, though I didn’t feel it improved my comment particularly.

“No problem,” he assured me, demonstrating that he was as polite as he’d seemed before his incredulity had got the better of him.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I continued, struggling to try to justify myself.

He nodded and smiled again. But he was already moving away to his left, reminding me that he had work to do. I’d wasted quite enough of his time.

In any case, I had no desire to prolong the conversation. I grabbed the packet of pooper scoopers and made for the tills as quickly as I could.

I treasure the lesson, though. Miscommunication can be painful. Even embarrassing. But it isn’t always the fault of the person you may at first think.

Americans and their words

The reason I find the occasional eccentricities of their English baffling is that Americans often make excellent use of the language. 

Here’s the opening of John Grisham’s The Litigators:

The law firm of Finley & Figg referred to itself as a “boutique firm.” This misnomer was inserted as often as possible into routine conversations, and it even appeared in print in some of the various schemes hatched by the partners to solicit business. When used properly, it implied that Finley & Figg was something above your average two-bit operation. Boutique, as in small, gifted and expert in one specialized area. Boutique, as in pretty cool and chic, right down to the Frenchness of the word itself. Boutique, as in thoroughly happy to be small, selective and prosperous.

Except for its size, it was none of these things.

Better written than one might expect

Why do I like this writing?

Firstly, I find it refreshing that Grisham breaks a couple of my own taboos. Repetition, for instance, as in using the word “firm” twice in quick succession. I go out of my way to avoid such repetition. He’s also relaxed about the passive (“was inserted”) which I try to avoid, on the grounds that active verbs are more dynamic. Or so I’ve been taught.

Secondly, the simplicity of the style is engaging. “Two-bit”, “pretty cool” – the language is everyday and familiar. The last three sentences don’t even have a main verb. And Grisham avoids pompous words. Indeed, the only moderately recherché word is “boutique”, but its Frenchness and slightly high-flown tone make his point. You might perhaps quibble about “misnomer”, not perhaps a common term, but it’s hard to imagine anything to replace it without a long and clumsy periphrase.

This understated style is an ideal I pursue. It feels like no style at all, letting the reader apparently straight through to the meaning underneath.

It’s only simple in appearance, however. Those last three sentences represent a classic trick of rhetoric, the rule of three ending in a cadence. Compare it with the Churchill speech:

Never in the field of human conflict
was so much
owed by so many
to so few.

It’s a powerful device of the best orators. And Grisham even closes by including a second set of three within the first: “small, selective and prosperous.”

Then he opens a paragraph with a short, punchy sentence that undermines everything he has said before. It all adds up to an effective hook to draw the reader into the rest of the book. Which, incidentally, I enjoyed.

If your taste is for something more elevated, you could do worse than turn to Carl Sandburg. He was a poet but also the author of a fine biography of Lincoln. He describes a young Civil War soldier discovering the body of another that had been left for a year sitting apparently at ease against a tree, and tells us:

He had interrupted a silence where the slants of silver moons and the music of varying rains kept company with the one against the tree who sat so speechless, though having so much to say.

p.366 of the paperback edition of 

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years

The use of the word “slants” is a poet’s touch: it’s unclear that there’s such a thing as a “slant”, but perfectly clear what he means. In addition, the sentence has a single comma, dividing the long flow of description of the physical scene from the last few words – another cadence – that add a new dimension to the scene and make it representative of far more than itself.

Americans make use of the language as well as any English speaker. That’s why I find it difficult to understand the bizarre turns of phrase they sometimes adopt.

Why do they visit with, or meet with, people? You can hardly meet or visit anyone without them, can you? So what’s wrong with simply visiting or meeting them?

They can be clever about filling gaps in the language. British English has no expression corresponding to French “bon appétit.” The Americans have turned to “enjoy”, a generally transitive word used intransitively, to make up for this deplorable lack. I’ve adopted it with enthusiasm.

I wish they’d come up with some way of expressing the distinction between “connaître” and “savoir” in French, or “kennen” and “wissen” in German: it’s the difference between knowing a person and knowing a fact. The absence of a distinction in English allows us to play on words, as in “I know about him, but I don’t know him”, but the language is still poorer for not marking this real distinction.

Similarly, it’s an irritating gap in English that we have no single word for the opposite of “behind”. The French have “devant” to go with “derrière”, the Germans have “vor” as they have “hinter”. All we have is the laborious circumlocution “in front of.” With their creative approach to language, I’d have expected the Americans to come up with a bright translation for “vor” or “devant”. But they’ve done the opposite. They’ve used “in front of” as a template, to give us the equally ugly and unwieldy “in back of”, as an alternative to “behind.”

A disappointing lack of imagination, if I may be allowed the criticism.

Still, it’s nothing like as awful as the expression I came across the other day. I was informed that something had been “based off of” something else.

Now, with an expression that is essentially an image – “based” is being used metaphorically – there ought to be some link to the reality behind it (or in back of it?) If you’re off it, you’re certainly not using it as a base.

As for off of, whatever is the point of the second preposition? If something’s off its base, what more need be said? Surely it’s off your head to add that “of”? Or off of it.

Sarah Palin: the intellectually challenged would like to challenge us linguistically

Sarah Palin, firmly in the running, if not leading the field to be the most intellectually challenged candidate ever for US Vice President, has called on immigrants to her country to “speak American.”

Palin: verbally challenged as well as intellectually

There are some 400 million Americans who speak Spanish as a first language. 38 million of them live in the United States. Only about 256 million US citizens speak English as a first language, with a shade under 20 million Canadians and a few million West Indians. So if it means anything at all, the notion of “American” as a language must first and foremost mean Spanish.

Naturally, that isn’t what Palin intended. In her CNN interview, she went on to clarify – and I use the word “clarify” in a broad sense – “I mean, that’s just, that’s – let’s speak English.”

Verbal expression is perhaps not her strong point (though, to be honest, I’ve rather given up trying to find out what her strong point might actually be.) According to The Guardian, she ended her piece with an appeal to be given charge of the Department of Energy:

I think a lot about the Department of Energy, because energy is my baby, oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use, instead of relying on unfriendly foreign nations for us to import their resources.

She ended with this stirring tribute to her plans for the department: 

And if I were head of that I would get rid of it.

If by “American” she means “English”, then before Palin calls on others to learn the language, perhaps she could take a little trouble to master it more fully herself.

Separated by a common language? Over-united more like. With some odd quirks

On both sides of the Atlantic, we love to quote the Shaw view that England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

A completely different view was expressed by the first US Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. He’d been a leading aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, but emerged in the 1790s as an outspoken Anglophile. Which made him the nemesis of Thomas Jefferson, Anglophobe and friend of the French.

Hamilton told a leading British agent “I have always preferred a connection with you, to that of any other country. We think in English and have a similarity of prejudices and predilections.”

Indeed. There is something out there which the French call the “Anglo-Saxon” mentality, and not as a compliment (they move quickly on to talk about globalisation and neo-liberalism). It tends to come out in a joint obsession between the two countries to put profit before pretty much anything – if Britain, as Napoleon claimed, is a nation of shopkeepers, the US is a country of mall operators – and to use military force against anyone who is even suspected of possibly jeopardising such a sacred way of life.

As a result, even an ostensibly Centre-Left government could end up trotting obediently into Iraq at the beck of possibly the most inept of US presidents, Dubya Bush. We’re still paying the price twelve years on. And it’s likely to get worse. Just because ISIS are a lot grimmer even than Al Qaida doesn’t mean we won’t face something still more dire down the line.

Yep. That’s the one we chose to follow into Iraq
Might have been useful to have spoken a different language:
he made no sense in ours

The community of thought which makes possible this kind of consensus, with all its beneficial consequences, surely owes much to the fact that on both sides, “we think in English.”

So – it’s more a matter of two nations (along with New Zealand, Australia and Canada – predominant whiteness plays a role) bound together, for better or for worse, by a common language.

What differences exist, are pretty insignificant. Does it really matter that Americans wear their pants outside, covering their underpants, while we keep our pants inside, with trousers over them? I think not.

Even so, from time to time I find some of the differences a little quaint. Quaint to the point of bizarre. Here’s a curious contrast between the two sides of the pond in the use of prepositions (little words that really matter in this common language of ours).

If I were to call in on my friend Tom, I would reckon I was visiting him. In the language the French persist in calling “Américain” I would, however, be visiting with him. That always strikes me as slightly odd. I feel that if I’m visiting with Tom, then we’re popping in on someone else, George perhaps. Together.

On the other hand, an American desiring to enter into correspondence with him, would write Tom. Without a preposition. Again, that puzzles me. Surely if you write Tom, you have to be penning a piece of fiction? Shakespeare wrote Touchstone, and pretty clever it was too. If he’d wanted to send him a letter, he’d have written to Touchstone. Which, if he’d expected a reply at least, would have been pretty silly. 

Branagh playing Touchstone in As You Like It.
He did well to write him, but never wrote to him.
And wouldn't have had a reply anyway

Occasionally I listen to books instead of reading them. Recently, I was listening to a book being read by someone called Edward Herrmann. What struck me about him was that, despite being American, he pronounced the word “era” in a way that distinguishes it from “error”. As I do. Generally, on the other side of the pond, the words are indistinguishable when spoken.

This is awkward if we wanted to describe, say, the time of Dubya, if I can return to that sad period. In British English, even in the spoken language, we can distinguish the two words in “error era.” In Américain, they’re the same. You’ve got to admit that would sound a bit silly.

On the other hand, you might argue that to sound silly when talking about the Dubya presidency is entirely appropriate.

And you may well be right.

Lively English

The young woman was pleasant and polite. At the counter in Costa’s, she stood back to let me through, laughing off my apology.

‘No, no,’ she said, ‘please. I haven’t made up my mind yet. You go right ahead.’

She was dark-skinned like many of my compatriots, and spoke perfect southern-British English with a slight hint of the lilt that betrays a West Indian background. A long way in the background.

I found a table and slumped at it, exhausted. Despite decades of doing them, I still fall apart after a presentation, brought down by the aftermath of the adrenalin rush. In this instance, it hadn’t helped that I’d only discovered the day before that I was expected to talk for an hour, not twenty minutes; the extra work on my material had left me little over five hours for sleep. I stared at my coffee oblivious to my surroundings and concentrated on getting my breath back.

Until I heard voices from the table next to mine, and realised that the woman from the counter had joined a friend there. They were chatting – and I could have been in Kingston, Jamaica. The West Indian accent is magical, and I was getting it strong and rich from those two women.

And that got me thinking. English is becoming rather too homogenised for my liking. There are no real dialects, except perhaps in West Africa. The lack of variation is underlined by the way people insist on referring to the differences one comes across in Yorkshire or Louisiana as being dialectal, whereas in reality they’re just regional accents.

It’s true of course that American do have their quaint little ways. Calling a lift an elevator, for instance. While you may need to lift something to lower it, how on earth do you get downstairs in something designed to elevate you?

However, those little quirks to one side, there’s little to choose between British and American usage. If I ever have trouble understanding Americans, it’s not usually a linguistic problem but sheer amazement that anyone can make that kind of statement in any language – you know, references to legitimate rape or to 47% of the population living on benefits.

The same thing happens in England, when I hear the language of rights in the mouths of politicians who have done so much to limit them. It’s worse in their case, since they speak standard English. I hasten to add that ‘standard English’ is, naturally, the language spoken by us standard Englishmen, in case anyone in the colonies is still labouring under any confusion on the subject.

What astonished me in the café was to realise that the two young women at the next table had no trouble expressing themselves in standard English, and then switching to something far more Jamaican when talking to each other. And it wasn’t the first time I’d come across the phenomenon: I know at least one other West Indian who speaks very differently with someone from the same part of the world than with a monolingual standard-English speaker.

It’s just like a Frenchman speaking English in London, but switching back to French with a compatriot. Or more to the point, a Dane: I was astonished by the quality of English in Copenhagen.The more I heard it the more I realised that the Danes don’t speak English as a foreign language, they speak it as a second language. Their mastery of it is quite as good as good as many a native speaker’s.

Copenhagen, great English-speaking city

‘Can we get a meal?’ I asked, in English, of a waitress who’d addressed me in Danish.

‘I’ll check if you like,’ she replied in my language, ‘but this is a restaurant.’

I’m not used to having my stupid remarks put down with swift banter by anyone with only a foreigner's grasp of the language. Which is what made me realise I wasn’t dealing with a foreigner. Sure, technically she was, in that she held the citizenship of another country, but she belonged to the same speech community as mine. The Danish accent is a regional accent not a foreign one. The difference is only that Danes speak another language too, and use it among themselves.

Just like the two West Indians in Costa’s. They’ve mastered two linguistic codes and know which one goes in which context. OK, unlike Danish, the code they use to each other is close enough to mine for me to understand them with ease. That wouldn’t have been the case had they been speaking Danish. 

But still what they have is a dual code. And in poor sad dialect-impoverished English I found that fascinating. At last – evidence of that variety that Italian or Portuguese, German or Spanish take for granted. That can only enrich the language.

So my visit to a plain old West London Costa’s turned out to be rather more interesting an interlude than I’d expected.

Which in turn was a good tonic to help me recover from the presentation.