PERSONAL COLUMN
Vote, vote, vote for Laura Norder!
STELLA FitzTHOMAS HAGAN
It's anathma to me, says some telly personality. Shows are put on at the Pladium. Somebody's dimonds are stolen. Lady Vilet is reminisced over. Pleece vilence ledged in Nothen Island. Revlutionries all over the Wessen Hemsphere. Caplist civlisa- tion is deterating, says Trana Radio. The Straylan Abridginies are people about which we don't know much about. Poltics is dom- nated by eecnomics. The moon rocks are signtificly intresting. Plitticle conmy is a favrite subject but one in which I am not well versed in. The lectrate is watching the preprations for the Genral Lection. (Sor- ry—the Gen ralection.) Have you seen what Timagzin says about our Priminster? We have an onrus task before us. We want elec- tive sponsibilty, not unilatral decisions. The pay offers are not satisfactry. Will Vetnam fighting spread into Louse? This is the Unighkindoma Grabrinna Nothanighlan. Mr B has an ebb-youlent personalty. The Boisiders hoisted the Trickier flag. The forces of Laura Norder must prevail. And bear in mind there's a Laura Nature, too. Will there be another influx of Kenyarasians? Russiaranchinara hotting up their propgandareffots. Children love bnanarice.
So ox, ox, elision is customary and part of the normal phonetics of English, as a heavily stressed language, and especially before '1' and `r.' (foundry, carpentry, and others have long been so spelt). But if all this is now the 'Received Standard'—every one of these ex- amples is taken from the speech of BBC an- nouncers and newscasters and com- mentators—then isn't it time the English- speaking Union, or someone or other, granted them official Orthographic Recogni- tion? It would be such a relief to teachers and pupils ...
And then again, the Poet Laureate, no less (not to mention roughly 50 per cent of everyone else) says 'a man who I know told me so'. And there's the Waynwhich Syn- drome—I confidently await the de-squaring of the old nursery rhyme into 'This is the waynwhich the ladies ride', and the idiom- installation of 'I didn't like the waynwhich he looked at me'. That's the waynwhich to do it in. Yes, yes, the double preposition runs riot, may God and Milton have mercy on us. (Could there be penal sanctions for this reckless waste of time in using four words where just one will do?) Then there's. the Nominative-Objective Shift, another hot favourite. Daddy gave it to Charles and I. You have to understand we British. It was very hard for she and her partner. Oh yes, it's by no means just a matter of prunsation (as an 'educationist' recently called speech- sounds). At the 'moment, flaunt for flout and prevaricate for procrastinate are running neck and neck—only the other day someone told us that the unions had decided to stop prevaricating and to begin flaunting the rules. Even that seemingly fairly obvious concept, the difference between singular and plural, is in almost total confusion. The X Theatre is happy to announce THEIR forthcoming production. (Whose?) An 'Army expert' explains that THESE regiments have EACH ONE carved out for THEMSELVES ITS own. niche. A Tv reporter says the demonstration HAVE engulfed into Piccdilly Circs. (Could you just demonstrate that, please?)
All right. But what must poor teacher do now, poor thing? Teaching school-leavers in Colleges of Further Education (who clamour to be trained in 'correct' spelling, but very naturally quarrel with 'chaoticly' being con- sidered wrong when it's so obviously what everyone says), just what line ought one to take? It wouldn't be much use my in- troducing the use of .the International Phonetic Alphabet all by myself. And the days when people on the whole tended to absorb spelling by dint of regular reading are past and gone. One can make a joke of it all, pass it off lightly, but the joke's getting almost rancid these days.
And even those who do do a bit of reading are liable to get more muddled and rightly disgruntled than ever, seeing that 'prepra- tion' and `scientificly' appear in print—in `qii..lity' journals, what's more—and ap- pa- Intly very reputable journalists are wed- ded to the notion that 'prevaricate' means delay and 'flaunt' means disobey. Teacher says one thing and immediately some telly ' P says the opposite, and their newspaper prints it, so would you believe teacher?
As for the 'intrusive r'—which the BBC once told the Guardian 'is now received', without saying who made the decision—it is very apparent that English is a liaison-ad- . dicted language (an apron, from 'a napron', and the entire use of 'an', articulation of plural 's', unlike French, and so on). We speak in 'breath-groups', not in single words. The s-liaison in French is linked to the spell- ing, but even French has an 'intrusive t', in a-t-il, va-t-elle, and so on. The point is that French incorporates this 'illogical' and academically 'unjustifiable' -t- into the spell- ing. Why shouldn't we do the same with our 'intrusive r'? If the phrase is supposed to be 'vanilla ice' or 'Ave Maria on the organ', then hearing `vanillarice and `Mariaron' still shocks my ear (while the lack of any r in the written form vaguely worries a lot of learners, who know that they say it). But if the admitted and accepted way of writing such phrases was vanilla-r-ice, Ave Maria-r- on the organ, Kenya-r-Asians, Russia-r-and China, we should all very quickly 'get our eye in' and that old gap between 'right' and 'wrong' would be a little narrowed. (It would also be a great help to foreigners learning English, who are my main concern.)
But of course, with such written forms as .the orchestra-r-is tuning up, we should be running into the Golgotha created by the Great Anti-Hyphen Heresy. This is another quasi anti-pedant device, which has recently wrought both visual and aural havoc far and wide. (Yes, I am aware that Gowers remarked, 'if you start thinking seriously about hyphens, you will undoubtedly go mad', but on the other hand if you abandon them altogether everyone else will gradually sink into imbecility along with you, so noblesse oblige.) The principal victim of the 'Hyphens Are Obscene' cult is the compound adjective, and the chief balls-up—for my own part, I dote on hyphens, sensibly used, they're so consolingly explicit—occurs among the unfortunate reading-aloud slaves of the typewritten script.
If the typist-trainers could have nerved themselves to requiring these to be produced as 'blue-and-white china', 'a one-horse show', 'and in the North-East of England', then there would have been no difficulty, no hesitation (sometimes you can fairly hear the poor readers wondering to themselves w hat the hell this is that they're saying), and no nonsensicality.
But my problem's in the classroom. What, what, what am I to TEACH the willing. enough but suspicious and near-alienated members of Further-Education 'English' classes? (There's also, incidentally, the permanent never-answered wondering w hat in the name of God the school teachers have been doing with them for the past ten or eleven years? They haven't had time to forget it yet, but this 'it' is undiscoverable.)
Help! Help! Could we perhaps just abolish 'spelling' and 'grammar'? If English is to go as Latin did, we're now in border country between Vulgar and Dog. Is it time to stop bothering? If not why not? Eh?
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