The other day I overheard a clip from Rising Damp, which my wife was watching again. It was that part where Miss Jones – that archetype of the aspiring lower middle-class female – was confusing Rigsby with her pronunciation of "traits". Like my mother, Miss Jones pronounced it "trays", confirming all that research in the sociolinguistic literature which shows that it is women, and women of that rank, who drive linguistic change.
Before returning to Marchant's Life of Byron, my thoughts flitted to a comment made by the multilingual English football manager,Roy Hodgson , currently of Fulham – who I will be cheering on tonight against Chelsea – arising from the nine years he spent in Sweden in the 1970s and '80s.
"The Swedes don't even hide it: jealousy is their national trait. We are more civilised but it is still in our nature."
Before returning to Marchant's Life of Byron, my thoughts flitted to a comment made by the multilingual English football manager,
"The Swedes don't even hide it: jealousy is their national trait. We are more civilised but it is still in our nature."
Now I know very little about Swedes apart from what I've seen in some pretty grainy 1970s films, and am in no position to argue with the former Halmstad and Malmö manager. But, I wondered, if jealousy is the Swedish national trait, what about the British? Hypocrisy, I would hope. The French? Arrogance? The Germans? Humourlessness. The Canadians? Earnestness? The South Africans? I'm not sure where to start.
Where does that leave the Asian nations, I wonder? Answers on a postcard ...
6 comments:
SA - defensiveness
Most Asian nations: authoritarianism. Now what about the Welsh?
Shouldn't that be "whom I will be cheering on"?
The m in "whom", is, as far as I'm aware, a case ending to indicate the accusative added to "who" (which is derived from an Old English word) by prescriptive grammarians whose mission in life was to force English (a Germanic language in essence) to be parsed like Latin.
There are a number of other "rules" which are equally baseless, such as not ending a sentence with a preposition ("something up with which I shall not put", as Churchill pithily observed) and avoiding split infinitives. Regarding the latter, consider an expression such as "She failed to completely understand the book", where placing the adverb in any other position in the sentence would change the meaning, be ambiguous or be unnatural.
And talk of "unnatural" leads to another important point for written English: that it should be as rhythmic as possible. It is for this reason that many writers, such as C.S. Lewis, advise budding authors to read their texts aloud before publication.
Point taken, but in that case surely "whom" has another purpose: to enable those who use it to feel superior to those who do not. But joking aside, there are times when it feels more natural than "who" - as in "to whom it may concern". Try the reading aloud test on both versions of that one.
Fossilised linguistic forms are a special case. Compare "if I were you", where the subjunctive mood (NB never successfully introduced into English by the armchair grammarians!) is a lot more natural for an educated speaker of a certain age than "if I was you"!
Are people implying that I am a combination of earnest and authoritarian?
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