AND ANOTHER THING
Money-speak means that bonking can lead to a forecourt mentality
PAUL JOHNSON
The French-speaking Swiss, not to speak of the French authorities themselves, are furious with the decision by Zurich to replace French with English as the premier foreign language taught in its schools. About 65 per cent of the Swiss speak German, or its local variety; less than 20 per cent French and less than 10 per cent Italian. There is abundant evidence that English is becoming the lingua franca of the country, and the decision is therefore both natural and popular. The information revolution, and its impact in financial markets, are slowly but surely forc- ing businesses to conduct their affairs in English. If we have lost the battle on metrica- tion, we have hit back strongly on money- speak. Some years ago, the major Swedish companies began to hold board meetings in English, a practice now widely followed in Germany. The Swiss are merely conforming to a European pattern; and the EU in Brus- sels, which continues to conduct much of its routine verbalising solely in French, is one of the most old-fashioned institutions in exis- tence. Led by the young, France itself is beginning to anglicise its language despite all the efforts of the government, law and cul- tural establishment. When a newspaper like Le Monde uses the word stopper instead of (ureter in a front-page headline, and manager instead of patron or gerant, it is clear that the battle to halt Franglais has been lost.
Whence comes the power of English? It is not recent. It long predates the advantages it acquired from the spread of technology, beginning with the first industrial revolution. The process began when Anglo-Saxon, or Middle English as it was becoming, con- quered the French of the ruling class, but not before it absorbed an enormous quantity of useful French words, constructions and rules. The Hundred Years War consolidated the triumph of English, just as it produced Per- pendicular, the English vernacular of Gothic architecture. The works of Chaucer in the late 14th century already illustrate the pecu- liar strength of the written tongue; its sinewy ability to modulate and invent, as well as its fly-sticker gift for adhering to any valuable foreign terms buzzing within range. It was always .a free-market language, never regu- lated centrally, as Richelieu tried to do through the Academie Frangaise. Its flexibili- ty made it a perfect proving-ground for neol- ogisms invented by literary entrepreneurs. Shakespeare was not only a linguistic mag- pie, stealing and anglicising nouns from half a dozen languages, dead or alive, but an inspired verbal alchemist, conjuring up new terms whenever he was at a loss for a word. Milton, Dryden and Pope were creative wordsmiths too. Byron invented those two useful terms bored and blasé. Scott contribut- ed gruesome (one of my favourite words) free-lance, red-handed and stalwart. Burke produced financial, expenditure and colonial. He certainly coined representation and proba- bly the political term constituency, too. Macaulay introduced period terms such as Elizabethan and Georgian. To Jeremy Ben- tham we owe international, and to Coleridge a number of German usages, such as phe- nomenal and pessimism.
Cultural colonialism, which we practised from the 17th century, had its reverse flow. From India we got a continual accretion of words, often at one remove. Filtered by Por- tuguese, Indian words supplied muster, padre, peon, caste, cobra, mosquito, joss, linguist, monsoon and typhoon, mango, chop, curry, catamaran and many more. Through Indian- Dutch we got, surprisingly, burgher and pars- ley. Indian words we adopted direct included toddy, veranda, pukka, wallah, baboo, mahout, cheroot, loot, shawl, bamboo, pagoda, chintz, calico, gingham, cutter, dinghy, and typically 'I don't care a dam'. The pro- cess continues — who, five years ago, would have known what a pashmina was?
More important sources of new English were the Americas, words often being medi- ated by American, Canadian, French, Dutch and Spanish settlers. Thus the Dutch-Ameri- cans gave us boss, a wonderful term, and the French depot, rapids, shanty, chute, prairie, cache, crevasse. Via the Spanish we got ranch, patio, corral, lasso, mustang and som- brero. Dumb, meaning stupid, is German- American. Americans themselves were skilled adapters and neologists. They gave new variant meanings to old English terms such as brand, bluff, hump, knob, fix, creek, settlement, snag, stone, suit and bar. They produced running time, backtrack, portage, overnight, overall, medicine man, war party, as well as a tribe of new animal names, from rattlesnake to grizzly. Their neologisms began to influence politics: in the early 19th centu- ry they gave us squatter, caucus, mass-meet- ing. Almost every presidential election pro- duced a new prize; 1828 coined the spoils sys- tem, for instance. Many phrases we English think of as our own, indeed characteristically so, are actually American, and coined much earlier than we would expect. Thus keep a stiff upper hp is Yankee and comes from 1815, fly off the handle is 1825, sit on the fence is 1828 and bark up the wrong tree is 1833. There are obvious Americanisms too, like get the hang of a thing (1820), and there's no two ways about it (1823). Cocktail dates from 1806 when Jane Austen was deep in Pride and Prejudice — how one longs to know her views on the drink and the term! By this time, Americans were also filtering into English their characteristic constructions, embodying popular expressions — cave in, in cahoots, take on, stave off, hold on and let on. All these date from the 1820s or before, the prelude to tens of thousands of words and expressions with which American usage has enriched the English language in the last 200 years. Next to the Americans come the Australians who, in addition to their vivid slang, gave us useful words like togs and whinge. Then come the Caribbeans and, increasingly, the Asians.
The speed at which terms are invented, popularised, worn threadbare, discarded and superseded is akin to new technology itself, and is a reminder that speech and writing are demotic processes over which the elites have virtually no control. Words give expres- sion to and reflect the real world, which is changing all the time. I am not sure there is any longer such a thing as Standard English or Received Pronunciation. There is merely current English, which modifies itself so fast that all dictionaries are obsolescent.
Oddly enough, the evolution of English is one of the few aspects of the modern world which I find not merely acceptable but exhil- arating. I love to learn and use new words. If readers know of any, please tell me. I also enjoy the slightly guilty feeling of adopting a new and outrageous application of an old word. I would love to be a successful neolo- gist like Michael Wharton, who coined that delicious term rentamob, or Henry Fairlie who gave Spectator readers the Establishment. Who, I wonder, was the genius who invented the word bank as a genteel alternative to the still-suspect four-letter one? This brilliant coinage, I see, is now catching on in Ameri- ca. I heard last week someone say, 'You're developing a forecourt mentality', meaning an obsessive concern with petrol. Language marches on and we have no alternative but to march with it. Better to be in the front rank than to be dragged forward, snarling and spluttering, in the rear.
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