English English on trial

Penelope Gilliatt

An Eskimo judge of high degree, who has learnt English by gramophone record in an igloo, sits at the Old Bailey in judgment on the English language, represented by a small woman defendant of calm and significance. The courtroom has closed up shop for lunch. The defendant is eating fried bread and tomatoes. The judge is tucking into a tallow candle.

Judge: God may bless and watch over you. Defendant: May God bless and watch over you.

Judge: What's the difference ?

Defendant: All the difference in the world. A question of holding English in your ear. The difference between 'in back of' and 'behind.'

Judge: They're the same.

Defendant: No. Opposed. The instinctive tact of choice.

Judge: English words don't merely arrive. They derive. Old Norse, Old High German. Defendant : Like spirits from the vasty deep, they answer when we call. I don't suppose you have many sea shanties in your particular vasty deep, do you, given that it's frozen over ?

Judge: When you say given, do you mean given as the opposite of received, or given as the opposite of taken ?

Defendant: It'll come to you, truly, if you live here long enough.

Judge: When you say truly, do you mean truth as an abstraction distinguished from error, or truth communicating the opposite of falsehood ?

Defendant: Not quite either. And also not honestly, not sincerely, not really, not in all good faith, not to be perfectly frank (Nixon), not franchement (French), but truly. It means something fond, something close to an avowal. You'll hear if you pay heed. You must miss Eskimo language. A man cut off from his language is a footfall without an echo.

Judge: Therefore something proclitic ? Defendant : What?

Judge: Having no sequel, consequence, result, by-product, hangover, morning after, after-taste, afterglow, aftermath, aftergrowth, after-birth, placenta, afterthought, double-take, envoi, colophon, codicil, subscript, enclitic, queue, pony-tail.

Defendant : None of them. Echo.

Judge : No synonyms?

Defendant : There are no exact synonyms in English English. It's a very modern and brilliant old language.

Judge: You find me eld ?

Defendant : Your language, sometimes. Many words fall into desuetude and neglect. Judge: You are saying they are microliths. Defendant: No, I'm not. I'm saying you've got tin ears. You're new here.

Judge: You are saying I am an upstart, a mushroom, unhackneyed, in mint condition, evergreen, straight from the factory, fresh as a rose, untrodden.

Defendant : I certainly wouldn't want to tread on you.

Judge : That's honey-tongued, chivalrous, mathematically exact.

Defendant: You meant nice, I daresay. That's good of you.

Judge (with gavel): I'm going to bang my instrument.

Defendant : I hope not. I'm married.

Judge (bangs gavel and cries): Serial place in court! Uniformity ! Norm!

Defendant : You mean order.

Judge: You're evermore dissuading my British. When were you wed ?

Defendant : We were working together and we got engaged, and then he had to go to Paris, and after that we got quite engaged. Judge: Quite! You mean a little scrap? Fairly ? Not sufficient ?

Defendant (looks stricken): Quite also means absolutely. You didn't mean to, but you made a bosh shot there.

Judge: I don't comprehend when you're speaking waste-matter.

Defendant: Talking rubbish ? English isn't rubbish.

Judge: What's bosh shot ?

Defendant : It means you missed.

Judge: What's he like ?

Defendant : Perceptive without being observant.

Judge: They're the same.

Defendant : Not at all. He takes everything in about people but he wouldn't notice if there were mice, He wouldn't get in a state. Judge: In a situation ?

Defendant Het up.

Judge: Not in a condition ? There are too many shades of intention in British. Defendant : It's the greatest language in the world for a writer. When we need a word, it arrives. It may be invented. Others decline. In language as in other matters the supply fails when there is no probability of demand. Judge: You mean words fall into misuse. Defendant: Sometimes, but I actually meant disuse. Disuse and misuse are both the opposite of use but they're quite different. One of the most difficult things for foreigners to understand about English English is the way it accommodates the formal and the colloquial in one. Americans suppose that they have a copyright in slang—and their slang is mostly vivid, though I don't think much of 'flaky'—but, most of them don't like mixing written American with spoken American. Your lordship it is our mongrel tongue that has given us the greatest body of dramatic fiction and broadsheet writing in the world. Its grades of meaning express the most particular subtleties of manners and attitudes to life, including political ones. For instance, the notion of going along with the extreme Left. Simone Signoret writes of it in French as 'being a companion along the route.' But the CP in France is not placed as ours is. We call the same thing 'fellowtravelling', and the words carry a fog around them. They mean something less precisely political, something skulking.

Then there're the affair of our writing in quotation marks.

Judge: Of writing plays ?

Defendant: Of speaking at a tangent. Of absenting oneself a step from what one's saying. It makes possible the degrees of irony and half-denial and self-mockery that visitors find mysterious and sometimes brutally cliquish. Am I on trial for this, too ? It's the fault of all of us. We may think the class-system is beaten, but we're still a nation of sixty million castes, each inhabited by one. It's much more lonely than in Japan. Judge: The court will have to accuse the British tongue, in the corporeal form of the defendant, of word-glorification without redeeming social value.

Defendant: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, here's your hat. Have you seen Banana Ridge? Ben Travers? One of the masters. He's keen on the sound of a k. Mr and Mrs Pink figure. 'Pink! I like your cheek !' There's a lot of monkeying around, and people wind up at the Klocks. Ben Travers can make lines double back like a wishbone. 'Good morning,' says someone fast ; 'Good heavens!' says someone else. Shorthand, lopped sentences. 'Many a true word, eh ?' says one of the harried ones, much like P. G. Wodehouse's great creation. In Banana Ridge, when a young man is being asked for, the line back is 'What sort of a young?'

Judge: And puns, I've no doubt.

Defendant: Not puns. They're more French than English. English doesn't need puns, except intentionally feeble ones in riddles and on seaside postcards. Puns are the efficiency experts of language, all time-andmotion study and no invention. English words can be made to mean anything a good writer wants them to. When Ben Travers's Mr Pink says 'I shoved my wife in a taxi', we've suddenly got a new five-letter verb. I heard someone say yesterday that he got an awful thrill from Tolstoy, and in one sentence he restored awful to its original meaning. Is Eskimo as good ?

Judge: Estimable. Are you prepared to forgo English with a caution ?

Defendant : That would be to give up the place where I live. I once asked a great old White Russian dancer why Russians could make such leaps. We were sitting by her Russian stove and speaking Russian. She said that she thought it was because Russians had such a big continent to cover. English writers can cover a wonderful expanse of land.