The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  All the way to:

  Widgie: a woman who embraced the counterculture of the 1950s and 60s, behaviour exemplified by short hair, tight clothes, wild behaviour and free sexuality (male equivalent: bodger, or bodgie).

  Woofering: military slang, initiation for a cadet in which a vacuum cleaner hose is applied to the genitals.

  Wowser: a killjoy or spoilsport, supposed to be an acronym of “we only want social evils remedied,” a slogan coined by John Norton, journalist and politician (1862–1916).

  Dr. Kate Burridge has described what she considers “the most distinctive feature of Australian English.” Hers may seem an undramatic observation but again and again in the history of the English language, the accretion of apparently small matters (the development of prepositions, for instance) has led to big changes. This whole adventure, a word which again earns its keep as a description here, I think, often depends on what seem hairline choices, almost imperceptible forks in the road, but once one path is taken, time and evolutionary circumstance can then channel the language to a completely unexpected and unintended place.

  This may be the case flowing from the Australian passion not only for abbreviation but also for adding “o” or “ie” at the end of words. Kate Burridge’s examples include: “Robbo, the weirdo journo from Freeo ended up on a dero and metho” or “I took some speccie piccies of us opening our Chrissie pressies at brekkie” — exaggerations, she admits, but perhaps the actuality will soon catch up because it does seem endemic, one of the ways in which Australian English wants to be its own tongue. It is interesting that this determination is driven not by the Australian establishment, which even as I write keeps its allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II in London and does not wish to sound like “broad” Australian. But broad Australian is where the action is and perhaps the future too.

  These endings can be derided as diminutive, but are also called “friendly” endings. Dr. Kate Burridge finds herself called “Kato.” A man who works on a wharf becomes a “wharfie,” a musician is a “muso”; “mozzie” for “mosquito,” “maggie” for “magpie,” and most common of all, “arvo” for “afternoon.” Dr. Burridge is as yet uncertain why some words take “o,” others “ie” and still others do not lend themselves to friendly endings. But I think she is right to hit on its significance.

  The other and for many foreigners the most striking characteristic of Australian English is the Australian accent. For a long time this was a source of annoyance and embarrassment to the authorities in Australia itself. In 1911, in The Awful Australian, Valerie Desmond wrote: “It is not so much the vagaries of pronunciation that hurt the ear of the visitor. It is the extraordinary intonation that the Australian imparts to his phrases. There is no such thing as cultured, reposeful conversation in this land; everybody sings his remarks as if he were reciting blank verse after the manner of an imperfect elocutionist.”

  Things had not improved by 1926, when the Director of Education in New South Wales wrote: “It is said that other people are able to recognise Australians by their speech.”

  Would he dare write that now? Through its soaps, its athletes and its writers, Australians now sound the world over like a people unselfconsciously proud and totally confident in the way they talk. Australian English sounds young, it has sap in it, there’s a kick in the lines. It is not so much that it has found its own voice. It began to do that early on in the unique conditions and the forced mixing of English regional, London, Irish and Scots, to many of whom vivid phrases and semi-secret codes were part of a livelihood. What it has done, in my view, and over the last two generations with a huge surge of energy, is to throw off the shackles of the old country while holding hard to the core of the language it gave them and turning it Australia’s way.

  22

  Warts and All

  It is often curious what great men are remembered for. Oliver Cromwell, regicide, first Protector, creator of our only Commonwealth, destroyer of magnificent castles and thought by some “Our Chief of Men” is also and perhaps equally remembered for saying “Warts and all” when discussing how his portrait ought to be painted. English no less than the countenance of Cromwell has its “warts” and in the interest of shade as well as light this chapter touches on what could be called the warts.

  There is another reason for this: I was discussing English at a meeting when a student stood up and pointed out that the English language was “great” (his word), but in the part of the world he came from it had also been very good at racism and racial abuse. He was right. English is astounding in describing and enlarging many areas of our external and internal experiences; these also include swearing and blasphemy, obscenities, vile insults and racism.

  The racism was partly a consequence of its fearfully rapid growth. It must have felt dangerous, even perilous and certainly giddy for these small islands within a few generations to have put that essence of national identity, language (by around the turn of the nineteenth century) into America, Canada, the West Indies, then South Africa, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya (from 1920), Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, various Pacific Islands, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, the Indian subcontinent . . . not to mention other countries already rather grudgingly taking on English as an essential second language.

  But that does not tell the whole story. Racism has to make other groups inferior. Racial denigration is always a demonstration of power, an attempt at total control, the use of language to stave off fears, reinforcing ignorance with prejudice. The best that can be said is that the English language was by no means the first nor the sole nor, sadly, is it likely to be the last language to find racist words.

  Perhaps the key to this chapter is to be found in what is often described as the first English novel — Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe’s shipwrecked Crusoe encounters a black native who has been put on the island as a punishment and expected to die. Crusoe relates:

  I understood him in many Things, and let him know, I was very well pleas’d with him; in a little Time I began to speak to him, and teach him to speak to me; and first I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the Day I saved his life; I call’d him so for the Memory of the Time; I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my Name; I likewise taught him to say, Yes and No and to know the Meaning of them.

  It is a paragraph exceptionally rich in pickings — there is the saving of life and the use not of force but of language, which is seen as the method of control; and that first word “Master,” a word which tormented so many slaves for certain. But Master it was, in 1719, and in some ways that word alone sets the scene for the next two hundred years.

  Friday flows easily. “Nigger” is in many places now thought the most unsayable word on the planet. No matter that it has a neutral history, that it comes from the word for the colour black in Latin and then in French, adopted by English, “nigger” carries the lash of a plantation whipping. It is as alive to offence as any of the religious oaths of the Middle Ages. Yet nowadays there are African Americans and others who use “nigger” with pride. This is a recurring feature of English, where again and again, in many contexts, people have taken on insults and turned them into badges of pride — “hack” is one, the “Old Contemptibles” another. But for many years and still now in many places, “nigger” was denigrating, unacceptable and fighting talk.

  So was “wog,” supposedly an acronym for “worthy” (or “wily”) “oriental gentleman”; “sambo,” from Spanish “zambo,” meaning a person of mixed Indian and African descent; “coolie,” from the Tamil word for “a hired person”; “kaffir,” from the Arabic word for “infidel”; “dago,” from the Spanish “Diego”; “frog,” applied first to the Dutch and then to the French. “Savage” is indiscriminate. “Kaffir” was used to insult the British in India before English absorbed it as an insult-word in South Africa. “Barbarian” — commonly used, like “savage” — can be traced back to the Greek word for
stammering and used by the Greeks to describe and laugh at the sound of languages other than their own. Like dragons’ teeth, a few seeds sprang up in battalions. “Spic,” “yid,” “paddy,” “chink,” “black,” “spade,” “jock,” “taffy,” “pom” and “yank” could be included as, I guess, and soon, the way the world goes, “English” and “American.”

  The black insults, and especially in America, were the most inflammatory and their sores and scars remain: “Negro,” “nigger,” “niggra,” “thicklips,” “Rastus,” “Uncle Tom,” “cottonpicker,” “coon,” “hard-head” and “boy.”

  Boy is a good example of a word which on the surface seems totally harmless yet in certain mouths, in certain circumstances, in certain times, it became an unbearable stigma, an intolerable insult. Boy! One of the characteristics of language is that no word is safe. No word is wholly clean. Look at “mother.” Said by some today, it can be intended to be the first two syllables of a four-syllable insult; to others it is the most affectionate word of all. Or, at the other end, “bugger.” Once an insult, it’s now routinely used by young men expressing goodwill. “Where’ve you been, you old bugger?” Words can whip around from north-east to south-west yet still on the page look precisely the same. “Wicked” in my youth was near-evil: in my children’s it is near-hysterically funny. Such rapid changes remind us that for all their extraordinary subtleties, in the end words express current feelings, passions, sensations often out of control of correct vocabulary, and such turbulent feelings will reach out for anything, like a madman about to commit a murder, any object at all to do or express what cannot be repressed any longer. So even a wholly inappropriate “wrong” word like “boy” can be used as a weapon in extremis.

  These insults are not unique to English. They come partly out of fear, which informs every encounter between unfamiliar peoples and has done, I guess, for the last hundred thousand years. Until proven as your friends, the next tribe have to be some sort of enemy and to make yourself feel stronger than them and safe from them, you diminish them. It still happens, with the same fearfulness and fury and based in the same ignorance, in our sophisticated, intellectually complex and progressive twenty-first century when we know, for instance, that the range of the human gene pool all over the planet is astonishingly, even dangerously narrow; that all of us came from probably no more than several hundred survivors way back in Africa; and that, literally under the skin, we are precisely the same. It does not stop us using superficial differences to claim profound superiority; and this can be seen in the way in which English began to see itself as not only a rich, varied, powerful and triumphant language, which it was, but an innately superior language.

  In 1848, a writer in the austere and academic London periodical the Athenaeum wrote of English: “In its easiness of grammatical construction, in its paucity of inflexion, in its almost total disregard of the distinctions of gender excepting those of nature, in the simplicity and precision of its terminations and auxiliary verbs, not less than the majesty, vigour and copiousness of its expression, our mother-tongue seems well adapted by organization to become the language of the world.” He was right in that last phrase. There are those who would find themselves agreeing with him to a lesser extent in the rest.

  Professor David Crystal, in English as a Global Language, took on the Athenaeum and took it apart. A language becomes global because of the power which supports it, he argued. Latin became an “international” language though the Romans (like the British) were by no means as numerous as those in their empire: they were, however, more powerful. Their army, our navy. He writes: “a language becomes an international language for one chief reason: the political power of its people — especially their military power.” Latin then got a second boost for one and a half millennia through the Roman Catholic Church. There is an analogy between British English (Roman) and American English (the Roman Catholic Church).

  Professor Crystal sees no power in innate aesthetic or structural qualities. At different times this has also been claimed for Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and French. This argument, he argues, takes us down a blind alley.

  Taking on the Athenaeum assertion in detail, he points out that “Latin was once a major international language, despite its many inflectional endings and gender differences. French, too, has been such a language . . . and so have the heavily-inflected Greek, Arabic, Spanish and Russian.”

  He does allow English a certain number of unique advantages, however, and these have counted and still count for something in the often narrow contest for supremacy. The English language is very familiar to many other languages, he argues, because over the centuries it has taken and absorbed so many thousands of new words from so many other languages. (Compared, say, with the French, who have tried to keep other languages out.) It was cosmopolitan from very early on. He says that though it came from Germanic roots it became over its first thousand years more of a Romance language, thus splicing together two of the most powerful forces in language. Professor Crystal also allows that there is an “absence in English grammar of a system of coding social class differences, which can make the language appear more ‘democratic. ’” Nevertheless he concludes that “these advantages are incidental” and points out the major disadvantage — the irregularities in the spelling system.

  The spread of English, he maintains, comes because having achieved power through the sword and sea power, it retained it through trade. Here we also have a language which benefited from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and the technological revolution of the twentieth century, especially the new communications technologies: telegraph, telephone, radio and the entertainment technologies: film and television. Language follows trade, which follows the flag, and the seeding of English in America is the key to its current success and may well be a prime determinant in modern history. Bismarck, the great nineteenth-century German Chancellor, said that the most important element in modern history was the fact that the North Americans spoke English.

  Not that American English utterly dominates: British English, as we shall see, still contributes a surprising amount, as do Englishes already described in other parts of the world. But Professor Crystal wants to nail any skulking romantic let alone mystical notion that in English itself, in that unique, enduring complex growth from Frisian to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to Joyce, from Joyce to Chomsky, there is anything “special.” It is very hard for a non-linguist to disagree with Professor Crystal. But does not the very scale of the English achievement merit a different take on this?

  There is an alternative view, expressed admittedly a hundred fifty years ago, but expressed by a genius. Jakob Grimm was not only one of the two brothers whose Grimm’s Fairy Tales remain as classic works of literature, psychology, folklore, tales from the darkest forests of an oral imagination, he was also a distinguished linguist and philologist. What he wrote was accepted then, in 1851: it still has interest, I think, today.

  Of all modern languages, not one has acquired such great strength and vigour as the English. It has accomplished this by simply freeing itself from the ancient phonetic laws and casting off almost all inflections; whilst from its avoidance of intermediate sounds, tones not even to be taught but only learned, it has derived a characteristic power of expression such as perhaps was never yet the property of any other human tongue. Its highly spiritual genius and wonderfully happy development, have proceeded from a surprisingly intimate alliance of the two oldest languages of modern Europe — the Germanic and the Romanesque . . . none of the living languages can be compared with it as to richness, rationality and close construction . . .

  In every war there are casualties. However annoying that cliché might be it is, like many others, true. English was involved in several battles and it still is. You could erect a tall memorial to the languages that fell or were wounded, sometimes mortally, in these conflicts. Native American and Aboriginal languages, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, have
surrendered or left the field. It is not only English that has done this: Greek, Latin, Arabic and Spanish before it had the same history, though not on as big a scale because there has never been a language expansion on such a scale. And also it is a fact that languages do die out. They died out before English came on the scene, they have died out over the past hundred fifty years without the help of English and no doubt some languages will die out in the future. Just as new languages, from pidgin to creoles, will emerge. But English has cut its swathe.

  The nearest example to its home turf is Welsh. Welsh derived from the Celtic widely spoken in these islands. It was pushed to the edges of the country by the invading Germanic tribes. It left only a few traces in English, as was noted at the beginning of this book. In effect it was a defeated language bypassed, neglected and of no importance to the adventure of advance, check, endure, advance, absorb, attack which shaped the story of English in its rich forward march. Celtic was literally, geographically marginalised on the main island — to the Gaelic north of Scotland, to Cornwall, and to Wales. It seemed penned in for ever, entombed almost, and for centuries it could consider itself an unlikely, fortunate, in some way an exceptional example of survival.

  If we skip a thousand years of successful hanging on to the language of the Celts, we arrive at the Acts of Union in 1536 and 1542, ostensibly made to ensure equal rights for the Welsh and English under the Tudors. Welsh people, it said, could speak as they liked, provided that “ . . . all Justices . . . shall proclaim and keep . . . all . . . Courts in the English Tongue; . . . all Oaths shall be given . . . in the English Tongue . . . no Person or Persons that use the Welsh Speech or Language shall have . . . any . . . Office within this Realm of England, Wales or other of the King’s Dominions . . . unless he or they use and exercise the English Speech or Language.”