Last year, I was cruising South down the Florida coast, headed for
home and minding my own business. The VHF radio was on, monitoring
channel 16 as per custom and the rules and a voice came on, a bit weak,
saying something in Spanish to another vessel too far away for me to
hear. They were certainly in international waters along with countless
other vessels steaming past the US en route to somewhere else.
"SPEAK ENGLISH!" blasted a nearby voice.
I
can't really think of a suitable word to describe that sort of ignorant
insolence, nor for the sort of person who thinks, probably in the name
of freedom, he can dictate to others what language they can speak or is
too caught up in the common Conservative low brow reflex to hearing some
language he can't understand.
I have to admit that
sometimes I feel the same way when listening to the American news media.
It's not so much that I'm forced to learn useless vulgar neologisms
like "twerking" but more that I simply and all too often have no idea
what they're talking about. Take HNN's recent discussion of a young
woman having been beaten to death in front of witnesses and cameras. I
don't know why, because every reference to the story I can find tells me
it was about a "photobomb." Every one, because the media in
their hysterical lust to sound trendy ( in the old sense of the word
since trend now means something entirely different) has run off the
linguistic rails. Somehow a very attractive young woman was murdered
for having done some insignificant but mysterious thing and I will never
know why.
SPEAK ENGLISH!
"I can't really think of a suitable word to describe that sort of ignorant insolence..."
ReplyDeleteReminds me of something I witnessed while visiting France years ago. We were in a small cafe in the Loire Valley having lunch when I heard a woman's loud voice. I quickly determined from her speech pattern that she was American, and she was angry because the waiter couldn't understand what she was loudly demanding he bring her.
"ROO-jay! ROO-jay! I want ROO-jay wine!"
The waiter shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
I slunk down in my seat, hoping no one would associate me with her.
It's a joke in our family now when we offer guests wine: ROO-jay or BLANK?!
When I was living in Paris in the 1990s, I recall an incident in the Metro as I was exiting at Palais Royal Musée du Louvre. An American woman accosted me on the platform and asked, "Do you speak English?" I should have played dumb. Apparently a man had just picked her packet of Kleenex tissues from her purse, and she wanted me to retrieve it. Damn, if that were the only thing the snatch purse snatched, she should consider herself lucky.
ReplyDeleteAnother time: In a café seated at an adjacent table, I overheard two Americans engaged in chit-chat. Topics of conversation: First, descriptions of their respective pregnancies in graphic detail followed by a visit to the dentist and the current status of their gums and “pockets.”
I vowed from that day forward: If you are an expat living in Europe, never admit to being an American - and hope you will never have to return to the uncouth, crude and classless USofA.
I suspect that back in 1928 when the term jive began to be used with regularity by the younger set that there were those who complained about made-up words ruining the purity of the English language. Dear William Shakespeare, who added at least 1,500 words and phrases to the English language according to conservative estimates (some credit him with as many as 10,000), was likely critiqued for inventing words and/or fashioning new uses for existing terms.
ReplyDeleteAs I'm sure you know, my dear Captain, every age has its slang and much of it eventually enters the lexicon of the English language. This is not due to the media but to us common folks who insist on using such terms. This wondrous Internet that provides so much information is not a word that would be familiar to English speakers 100 years ago. Slang is what keeps a language alive so that English doesn't go the way of Latin, a staid and inflexible language that met its demise long ago as a spoken language.
I am rather intrigued by twerking as it describes a precise physical act in a manner that distinguishes it from mere dancing. I love to dance but I do not twerk. No so much because I find it vulgar but because at age 58 my body no longer lends itself to the moves necessary for twerking. However, I did do the jerk, the watusi, the twist, and the hustle in my youth.
I confess to being on occasion bewildered by a term that I hear, much as I have no doubt that the older generation in the 1950's probably wondered exactly what made a cat cool or how one became hip. However, we do have an advantage today in that we may simply insert a word or phrase into Google or some other search engine (yet another new use of existing words) and find what it means. By the way, my favorite photobombs are those by children and animals.
The French have made a fetish out of trying to preserve the purity of their language by keeping out English words that become blended into what some French speakers derisively call Franglais. Back in 2011, the Académie Française began listing English words that it wanted banned from use (Fight against Franglais! French language website creates list of English words it wants to ban). Last year, the French parliament debated a proposal to permit some courses at French universities to be taught in English which raised the ire of the French only purists. Of course, there have been courses taught in English at some French universities for more than a decade but the purists are offended by the speech of the younger generation who have readily adopted Franglais and are continually adding new words and phrases. (Franglais row: Is the English language conquering France?).
This is not an argument but simply a somewhat different perspective. What I love about the English language is its richness and its adaptability. I taught English for 10 years at Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina and my department engaged in discussions about the continual evolution of the language. There were those who felt that the quality of the additions was inferior; they were the majority. I was a part of the vocal minority who insisted that the language was stronger for the adoption of new words, even slang, to more precisely define a new invention, concept, act, or idea. I do think that it's healthy for some thought to be given to how we expand our language. However, I am relieved that we don't have an Academy like the French to police American English. I can curse in French and in English, and English is so much more satisfying. We have far more interesting words and phrases and in comparison, the French language is rather meager in that area.
Yes, I know. They used to call the writers who introduced foreign words "inkhorns." Opposition to change and fear of loss is universal, but we shouldn't treat all change equally or in general terms. I oppose the loss of synonyms and the richness of English by the substitution of stripped down Newspeak and like Orwell, I don't see it as coming from the speakers of English as much as from the people using it to sell and control. Simplification is distortion. Much of it is deliberate and related to commerce, propaganda and politics and things that might have been ephemeral or transient or evanescent (don't you love English?) stay around for decades or forever because the media are trying to sound hip not to communicate or explain. Those three words are now "sucky" and for many people, only sucky and gleefully sucky -- we just love baby talk, don't we? I'm actually surprised Wolf Blitzer doesn't wear his hat backwards.
ReplyDeleteTwerking exploded into the news to associate TV culture with youth, ignorance, sex and rebellion, because that's the segment of the population that buys stuff they see on TV. The reason we' still gleefully say AAAAWWWWSONE! like we just won the lottery is that English is a commercial product and a sales tool. Without the tube, we would have stopped by now, if we ever started.
The media in 1928 was not writing exclusively for teens and pre-teens. It wasn't writing for the African American culture which has added so much to American English. Today any new colloquialism would be and is hooting from the tube within hours and perpetuated for decades. Did 'jive' subtract from the dialect because it replaced ten more subtle words? I don't think so, any more than Jazz made Mozart disappear.
American language police are with us too, forcing false dichotomies and political mandates on us and our children. I've heard from High school English teachers that Melville, for one instance, uses language that high schooler's can't understand thus making their opinion self-fulfilling.
German is a good language for vulgarity but not as good as English, IMO. (It's better however for making adjectival clauses.) English is, in my opinion better for speaking well of something too, but now that things can only suck or be awesome, perhaps change can be questioned? Maybe lack of education is driving "evolution" more than utility?
Is English changing because we fear it, because it's too much for people to learn it? I suspect so. Are politics damaging it? I think so.
'Twerk' wouldn't have spread worldwide overnight if we didn't have a worldwide media trying to sound cool, trying to ingratiate itself with the rabble so that the rubes would pay attention and buy their advertisers' products and patronize entertainment. Whatever a photobomb is, to me it shows a lack of ability, a lack of vocabulary and I don't see it as adding anything but subtracting something.
In short -- OK -- in too many words, Our English is reflecting our society and our society is about selling product, ideas and controlling people.
If English is evolving, and I fear it is, into something blurry, with unclear grammar and an ever decreasing vocabulary, I don't like it. We've come closer to the point where it can't be understood without gesture, tone and a little bit of theater, to the point at which a host of words have been driven off the market by "awesome" "sucky" "impactful" etc. and we're becoming a culture with different dialects for the educated and uneducated and the latter group is becoming more isolated from the culture and more involved with the narrow world of consumerism and entertainment and malignant politics. Orwell got it right and he usually does.
And by the way, speaking of the Watusi (the dance made for romance) I've been told by the language police that it's racist to say Watusi instead of 'Tutsi people' and it's always by people who don't know how agglutinative languages, such as the Bantu group, work. Watusi or better, Batutsi, simply means "the Tutsi People." the way Waganda or Baganda is what the people of Uganda and who speak Kiganda are called.
ReplyDeleteWah - oo - wah
Wah - oo - watusi
The Orlons made it to number 25 with their first hit in 1962. And what a year that was. First job, first car. . .
C'mon and take a chance,
And get a-with this dance.