You know what I mean?
The world’s favourite second language
An essay by Christopher Levenson
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Language surrounds us everywhere, most of it unselfconsciously, in the form, say, of public notices, instructions for use, or names on buildings. We think of it, if we think of it at all, as our common heritage, but, after religion and indeed often entangled with it, language is one of the most volatile issues uniting or dividing people.
First, though, a couple of personal anecdotes: in the 1970s I was travelling in the Western Highlands of Scotland with the woman who was soon after to become my second wife and her son, David. We were staying for one night at a bed and breakfast place in a very remote area. At a certain stage in the evening it became apparent to our hosts that David was not our child and that we were almost certainly not married. We were asked to leave. “Where the hell are we going to find somewhere else at this time of night?” I asked our host, understandably indignant. To which he replied, “I’ll no ha’e ye using the language on my doorstep.” By ‘the language’ he obviously meant ‘bad language,’ swearing. “Where the hell’ seemed to me very mild under the circumstances but the point is that, for me, as for anyone else who is interested in language, there is no such thing as ‘bad language.’ What we have to ask is not whether words or phrases as such conform to some rigid idea of virtue but whether in their context they are effective in conveying the literal meaning and the connotations, the overtones, the mood of the speaker. So-called strong language is like spice. Use too much and you swamp the original flavour, which is self-defeating, whereas exactly the right amount often adds urgency and emphasis.
The second incident took place more recently in Vancouver. I had just boarded a bus when the man in the next seat asked me why so many people had just got on. I suggested that, like myself, they had come from the cinema opposite. He then asked me how long I had been in Canada. I told him over forty years. “Forty years!” he responded, “and you still don’t speak the language!” Obviously from his point of view I should have said not ‘cinema’ but movie theatre. In my childhood in England, I would have said that I had ‘gone to the pictures’ or ‘the flicks.’
But what is the language? Just as there is no one version of ‘Indian English,’ so there is no universally accepted Canadian English as such. Although some people when moving within the English-speaking world to, say, Jamaica or South Africa, the USA, or Australia, either defiantly adhere to their original vocabulary and pronunciation in every respect or conversely accept every aspect of the new version, most of us make our own personal adjustments, retaining some words and discarding others. In my own case, for instance, while I grudgingly use the North American pronunciation of ‘tomato,’ and say ‘I guess’ rather than ‘I suppose’ or ‘I reckon,’ I cannot bring myself to pronounce lichen as ‘liken.’ For me it will always rhyme with kitchen, while, inconsistently or not, I pronounce the ‘h’ in ‘homage’ and ‘herb.’
In practice then we all construct our personal amalgam of words, expressions and pronunciations as a result of our own unique combinations of family and ethnic background, travel experience, reading at various levels of literature, and so on. But this is true also within our own native linguistic area. There are many common British words and expressions that, for various personal or social reasons, I would never use, unless in parody. For instance, I can’t imagine myself saying ‘Oh, how frightful!’ because for me such an expression has certain upper class overtones that I would not want to adopt. Basically, it is just not me. Indeed, I think most people are aware that there are certain ways of speaking within their own language that feel alien. So, there is nothing to be gained by being rigidly prescriptive. Which doesn’t mean that anything goes.
Obviously, the first purpose of any language is to communicate. Above all else, it has to be effective in that regard. It follows that some words or phrases are ‘better’ in particular contexts than others because they are clearer, more exact or more evocative. But beyond that we each construct our own individual language that is as unique to us as our dental charts, fingerprints, or DNA.
It is now time to get down to the main reason why English offers so many alternative ways of saying more or less the same thing. So, I’ll begin. Or maybe I’ll start. Then again, I might just commence. And if I ask which you’d prefer, you might answer, or reply, or respond. The point I’m making here is the very basic one that the English language has an incredible number of words when compared to most other Indo-European languages. Allegedly, though how anyone can determine this I don’t know, the English language recently acquired its millionth word. Is this a good thing? Basically yes – provided that you are going to use the words correctly. For in theory at least the more words you have at your disposal, at your brain tips, the better, in order to convey to your reader or listener every last overtone and nuance of your attitude, your state of mind and heart. To that end, dictionaries are useful, especially if they give derivations of words and examples of their use. This is one area where bigger does tend to mean better.
Of course, it’s not really that clear cut. Apart from inveterate crossword puzzlers or Scrabblers, most of us get by with a tiny fraction of the words that could be available. In conversation people often say ‘you know what I mean?’ and for the most part we do, more or less, but for people such as teachers, lawyers, journalists, and writers, who use language professionally, ‘more or less’ isn’t good enough. They have a vested interest in keeping our language in good working order. For them, knowing what a word ‘means’ in terms of a dictionary definition, and how to spell it is never enough. They need also to know the difference between the word chosen and similar words, apparent synonyms and homonyms. Because if you want what you are saying to be taken seriously, nothing is more ridiculous and self-defeating than to use long or obscure words in order to sound important. As someone wrote in the Globe and Mail: “English is messy and philandering and a kleptomaniac, wandering around the linguistic neighbourhood like a tomcat.” So, I trust nobody is reading this because they expect me to explain the English language. Because I can’t. I can praise some aspects and deplore others, I can regret certain inadequacies and glory in its strengths, but my real purpose is to stimulate curiosity so that when you come across a new word or phrase you don’t just learn its meaning but also wonder, and try to find out, where it comes from and how it differs from other similar words you already know.
Besides, so much of language is convention. In a sense all language is convention, what we agree on collectively. In English what we call a usually wooden, usually four-legged item of furniture around which we sit to eat and talk is a table. If someone insists on calling that object a giraffe or a pencil sharpener, he is not wrong in any moral sense. He is simply not accepting the conventions of the language that the item described is a table and not something else. If he persists in calling it a giraffe or an umbrella a taxi, he is not communicating successfully and will be regarded as mad.
At a more mundane level, even where there is no actual difference in the denotations of certain words, conventions apply. Look, for instance, at some of the synonyms for the adjective ‘fast’: rapid, speedy, swift, quick, hasty. If you said you were taking the swift transit system to an outlying suburb, or going out to buy some rapid food people would know what you meant but you would raise eyebrows because as native speakers we habitually say rapid transit and fast food. This applies also to the order in which we put words. Thus, we don’t say an ‘old little lady’ but a ‘little old lady.’ Even when the meaning is perfectly clear people are put out by any disruption of the set way of saying things.
However, as I hope to show later, creative writers often gain their most striking and profound effects precisely by thwarting our expectations and by juxtaposing words we had not thought of together. But then, part of any artist’s job is precisely to put people out, to jolt them, in the case of literature, by a surprise image or analogy, into new ways of thinking and looking. In general, though, words are addictive, habit-forming. Moreover, as politicians and religious leaders understand only too well, words condition the way we think and often set limits to what we think about. I’ll deal later with the use of language in politics, but just to take one example for now, if you think of the civilian victims of a military attack as ‘collateral damage,’ you are less likely to hear their screams or visualize their blood. You have been anaesthetized.
The fact that English has acquired such a huge vocabulary over the course of centuries is part of its relative advantage as a world language. Moreover, it didn’t hurt linguistically that first the British and then the American empires carried the language to every corner of the globe, either as soldiers and administrators or as merchants. But that’s still only a partial explanation. If we can imagine that Finns or Russians had conquered the globe to the same extent, I doubt whether Finnish or Russian would have become the world language in the same way that English is now. As I know from my own experience a few years ago, when I tried to learn Russian, the initial steps in learning all the case endings for instance were very difficult. The same applies even more so to Chinese, with more than a thousand characters to be memorized. The initial investment involved in learning such languages is enormous.
English, by contrast, is a very easy language to learn to speak badly because a lot of the formal barriers to rapid learning no longer exist. The initial grammar is straightforward, there are few case endings, English nouns do not have masculine, feminine, or neutral genders assigned to them, and to make plurals most of the time you simply add ‘s’. So, yes, one sheep, two sheep, one mouse, two mice, one child, two children, and most fish retain the same form in the plural, but you don’t have to learn several different declensions of nouns, each with distinctive plural forms, as you do in German. Which explains why, up to a certain level, English is very easy to learn. This in turn makes it ideal for basic communication and commercial purposes: so that understandably, it has become the main language of international airways and the internet.
However, once you get beyond this very basic level, English is one of the most difficult languages to speak well. Spelling is a major problem. One of the most famous examples, devised by George Bernard Shaw, is the spelling of the word ‘fish’ as ‘Ghoti’ with f pronounced as in rough, sh as in motion, i as in women. What this shows is the total irrationality of English spelling and an almost total absence of phonetic consistency. Many languages claim to be phonetic, in that their spelling follows certain prescribed rules and consistent patterns. Thus, in German ei is always the sound of ‘i’ in ice and ie always the sound of ‘ee’ as in ‘to see’, so that you can always at least work out how to pronounce a word even if you don’t know its meaning. English by contrast sometimes seems to go out of its way to be inconsistent. I am not talking here of the total weirdness of some old established family names in the UK where not to know that Cholmondely is pronounced ‘chumly,’ Beauchamp ‘beecham,’ Marjoribanks ‘marshbanks,’ and Featherstonehaugh ‘fanshaw,’ is to put yourself beyond the pale for a certain, now mercifully moribund, breed of upper class British twits. No, I am referring to one of the most glaring examples. Pity the poor non-native speaker faced with the letters ‘ough’. Should they be pronounced ‘off’ as in cough or trough; or ‘uff’ as in tough, rough, chough (a kind of crow) and enough; or ‘oo’ as in through; or ‘uh’ as in thorough; or ‘owe’ as in dough and although; or finally ‘ow’ as in plough, bough, sough, or slough (at least in the UK; here in Canada the pronunciation sloo is more common). In this context one can applaud the standard US usage of writing plow and thru. So, can we divine any rule here or are there only exceptions?
But once you have learnt how to say all these words, you are safe. On the other hand, there are many words, such as those found in the following sentences, where everything depends on the situation, the context:
Long live the Queen’s passion for live entertainment.
When he offered to lead the choir, the joke went down like a lead balloon.
I refuse to take out the refuse.
Do you have a minute to discuss the minute changes I need to make?
I shed a tear at the tear in my new pants.
Wind the scarf tightly about your neck, for the wind is cold.
Please close the door, the police are close.
He wound a bandage around the wound.
Often the correct pronunciation depends on whether the word is being used as a verb or a noun or an adjective. The grocer could not produce the produce. I was entranced by her entrance, which she had to perfect until it was perfect.
Things would be a lot easier if English, like French, were in the habit of attaching accents over syllables that had to be stressed or marks over letters to indicate a change of pronunciation. But not only do we not do that, except where obviously foreign words are concerned: many Anglophone businesses and rock groups add insult to injury by mocking the habits of other more orderly and consistent languages.
Take the case of the German umlaut (the term itself meaning a change of sound), which alerts the reader to a change in the sound of a certain letter. Thus, Das Haus, the house, becomes in the plural die Häuser because the umlaut over the a changes an ow sound to an oy sound (as in boy). However, in the English-speaking world the umlaut is thrown around as if it were confetti, merely for decoration, so that we get Mötley Crüe, whose umlaut over the u simply duplicates rather than changes the ue sound already there in English, while the ice cream firm Häagen Dasz by putting a totally unnecessary umlaut over the first a should strictly be pronounced ‘Hayagen Dasz.’
Irritating though such practices are they should not obscure the basic point that although it is easy enough to grasp the basic grammar, if you haven’t grown up in English it might well take you the rest of your life to master all the exceptions. I shall discuss later the historical reasons for this but for now we need to recognize that the main cause for this is an absence. When in the mid-seventeenth century the Academie Francaise was set up among other things to regulate the language and to decide what was and was not acceptable usage in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, England chose not to do the same thing with the Royal Society and so continued on our largely unregulated anarchic way at least until the mid-eighteenth century with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755. Consequently, despite some homogenizing influences such as the spread of printing and a gradually increasing literacy, England never had any one universally accepted authority that could decide what was or was not correct. Thus, even though people still speak of the Queen’s English, Oxford English, or BBC English, these supposed norms for ‘good’ English were based on class and educational divisions that are now largely irrelevant, and not just in Britain’s former colonies, where local, centrifugal forces wanted understandably enough to assert their own versions of the oppressor’s language, but also within the mother country. Nowadays, Yorkshire or Scottish or other regional accents that would have been anathema, except for comic relief, on the BBC when I was growing up are encountered every day without demur and rightly so. It is no longer possible, if indeed it ever was, for even the most prestigious dictionaries to prescribe, rather than simply describe, ‘correct’ usage, for the language has become infinitely flexible and has become the richer for it.
Which is not to say that no standards exist, and that anything goes. Nevertheless, it is precisely this flexibility, this ability to change with the changing times, places and circumstances in which it is spoken, along with the relative paucity of hard and fast rules, that has proved the greatest attraction of English to the rest of the world and made it everyone’s favourite second language. Take for instance the easy way English can convert nouns into verbs. From the noun ‘a showcase’ we can say: ‘This latest film showcases actor X’s talents.’ While with the noun ‘grandstand’ we can say: ‘The politician was grandstanding in front of his hometown audience.’ This works in reverse too. The verb construct ‘to know how’ (to do something), quickly morphs into a noun as in the phrase ‘Canadian know-how in fibre optics technology.’ Similarly, the verb ‘to walk up’ becomes an adjective in the phrase ‘a walk-up apartment.’ To demonstrate that this is something built into contemporary English, consider the following two examples that I devised just for fun:
The evening was a wash-out. The stand-in stand-up comic was a no-show.
Suffering from burn-out, he was stood up by his drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend,
who worked at a drive-in cinema next to the take-out pizza place.
…or again:
The recession was a wake-up call for drop-outs and has-beens, payback time
for Johnny-come-lately sell-outs with their winner-take-all, easy-come easy-go
attitudes and get-rich-quick schemes.
This is an integral part of the way English works today. The results often sound ugly or ungainly but the method succeeds in getting its point across. Just try doing this with French or German and you will find it much more difficult. You will probably end up using a lot of subordinate clauses.
However, my aim here is not to praise English for its vocabulary or flexibility, but rather to draw your attention to aspects of our language that most of us either take for granted or are completely unaware of.
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Born in London, England, in 1934, Christopher Levenson came to Canada in 1968 and taught at Carleton University till 1999. He has also lived and worked in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and India. The most recent of his many books of poetry is Moorings. He co-founded Arc magazine in 1978 and was its editor for a decade; he was Series Editor of the Harbinger imprint of Carleton University Press, which published exclusively first books of poetry. [Editor’s note: Recently we’ve published the initial chapters of Christopher Levenson’s memoir Not One of the Boys, Beginnings & Schools. Hardly the happiest years. Christopher previously contributed the essay on evolution of language On Permanent Loan, and has reviewed books by Margaret Atwood, Kelly Shepherd, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Jess Housty, Susan Musgrave, and Katherine Lawrence for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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