Splendours and miseries of the Queen’s English in the 21st century
The wonderful thing about language, and especially English, with its enormous vocabulary, is the existence of groups of words with broadly similar meanings but each of which conveys something slightly different. Such subtle distinctions add to the richness of meaning, in speech and writing, and to the pleasure of using words. And the sense changes over time, as historic events add moral overtones or undertones to particular words.
Take, for instance, the group of words meaning ‘friend’, of which there are about 30 or 40. None is exactly interchangeable. Many have undergone osmosis even in our own lifetime. Some are mysterious in origin and malleability. Crony, for instance. The word became pejorative in the 19th century, first in America (I think) in the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), which also gave rise to the related ‘spoils system’. The implication is that there is something financially improper about the relationship, a whiff of jobbery. The big OED is unsatisfactory on this term: ‘an intimate friend, an associate, a “chum”’. It does say ‘formed first after 1660... a term of university, or college slang’. It says it has nothing to do with ‘crone’. Well, obviously. The root must be Greek, cronos, time. A friend who has a gift for words says it was indeed university slang, but much earlier, Athenian, cronios, ‘long-continued’. A crony was someone you knew from schooldays or undergraduate frolics. Significant that the word is never used of female friendships. Queen Anne and Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, were in fact for a time cronies, but that is not the word one would use. There is no female equivalent. Nor is there much prospect, now, of the term being decontaminated and restored to its original, innocent meaning.
Various words for friend have been downgraded morally. ‘Familiar’ became pejorative during the witchcraft craze. In the 20th century ‘comrade’ was ruined by the communists, ‘collaborator’ by the Nazis and their Quislings, ‘brother’ by the trade unions. ‘Confidant’ has always been a bit suspicious, like ‘colleague’ in Scotland. Some words imply an inferior status in the relationship, ‘side-kick’, for instance, like confrère in France. ‘Intimate’ is tricky, rather like the American ‘bunkie’, but that is obsolete. ‘Soul mate’ is fey. ‘Mate’ itself is a lower-order term, like ‘buddy’ and ‘pal’; upper-order is or was ‘fellow’.
Most of these terms are further distin guished by the tone of voice or accent in which they are used. As a historian I am very interested in accent, one of the most important determinants in life, but one of the least studied because largely unrecorded until recently. Accents, like meanings, change all the time. I recently heard a recording of myself, done in the Fifties, and was amazed at the difference. I spoke painfully ‘posh’ in those days. The decline of hieratic and the universalism of demotic accents is relentless. If you listen to a recording of, say, Anthony Eden making a speech in the late 1930s, it sounds like a parody of toffiness. In the Abdication House of Commons of 1936 the common accent was Drones Club, though Edward VIII himself, oddly enough, spoke a weird American cockney. How did he get it?
The question of accents in history is fascinating and unfathomable. We know Queen Elizabeth had long, drawly ‘a’s because an ambassador used to do an imitation of her speaking French (‘Pa-ar dieu’, ‘Pa-ar ma-a foi’ etc), which somehow got jotted down. But what about James I’s Scotch accent? When he made the sinister remark, on first meeting Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘I have heard rawly of thee!’, what did it sound like? How one longs to hear the Old Whig voice and accent, which began to go out after the 1860s — an exchange, say, between Lord John Russell and Palmerston as they went together into the Cabinet Room (accompanied by gestures, of course, much commoner and more stylised then than today). One special accent I do recall, because I heard it, was old Lord Derby’s. He was a big, fat, jovial person (a ‘jovial Judas’ to his critics) known as ‘the King of Lancashire’. His accent was a mixture of broad Lancashire and upper-class ‘Aw-aw-aw’, the Lancs admixture becoming stronger the further north he found himself. The ‘a’s, short and flat north of the Trent, might become longer and less determinate in London.
I wish I’d heard Lord Curzon talk. He too had short ‘a’s (Derbyshire), but in all other respects was the quintessence of upper-class (vintage 1880s) manneristic pronunciation, with a dash of ‘soul’ talk added. When the horrid moment came and he was told he was not to be PM, and that Stanley Baldwin was chosen instead, he said, in exasperated despair, ‘A person of the utmost significance.’ Oh, to have heard that.
I used to say that there were 16 different ways of pronouncing the word ‘really’, each of which meant something quite different. The sense was conveyed not only by verbal tone and emphasis but by stress, volume, facial expression (eyebrows, formation of lips and nose-quivers, etc) and a good deal of minimalist body-language. But that was half a century ago. Today, the word is less used in its important emphatic condemnatory and interrogative senses, even in the upper ranks. As the class barriers crumble to dust and the demotic takes over, English talk becomes less interesting, both to deliver and to listen to. (But perhaps I am wrong, and readers can inform me of new and interesting subtleties which have emerged in the Age of the Entertainment Society.) Certain ways of talking in particular occupations have gone or are going. High Table English has virtually disappeared. Today the only don who uses the Academic Shout is Sir Raymond Carr, and he is well into his eighties. High Court Contumely has gone too. Perfected by Carson and F.E. Smith, it was last spoken with unselfconscious gusto by Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller 50 years ago. Its decline reflected fundamental social changes — no one, for instance, would today try to stop the parlourmaid reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even though it is now known to celebrate anal intercourse rather than ordinary poking. R.S.M’s English has gone, too, even in the Coldstreams: it is considered ‘inappropriate’ to call anyone ‘an ’orrible little man’.
Increasingly, verbal expressions, accents and tones do not merely die naturally; they are brutally banned. The police have been told to keep their ears cocked for accent jokes. How would Mike Yarwood make a living today? Among imitations now punishable by law are Mugabe addressing the Pan-African Congress, mullahs praying for suicide-bombers, an American bishop giving the homosexual version of the Lord’s Prayer and Mahatma Gandhi reciting ‘Gunga Din’. I wish old Kingsley Amis were still alive so we could have a satisfying grumble together.
Previous page
