As a teacher of English, I have had great fun demystifying the complexities that befuddle the newbie.
When one forgets the cultural implications and assumptions, both ill-founded, one can discover the fascination of the language, which is its readiness to absorb anything and everything from other languages.
This is why English is often called a “bastard” language, where the word means an unholy, unrepentant borrower from any source to sustain itself.
Understand me clearly. I am not into lingua franca or any other spurious reasons why the language is attached to power or notions of superiority. Many a deed of dastardly ilk has been inflicted on colonised countries “in the name of king and country”.
For me, the language is a subject the same way any other subject has its own validities and idiosyncrasies, vagaries and impossibilities which please and entertain.
Take the sentence: “Panama. A man, a plan, a canal. Panama.” It can be read from left to right with the same result. That is called “palindromic”. Words like noon, level, radar are palindromes. Are you able to extend the list? Then there is the clever: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”
Notice that it uses all the letters of the English alphabet. This is called a pangram. Another is: “Fifty-six crazy penguins jumped quickly over the awesome iceberg.”
Recently, it has become acceptable to do code-switching. This means that one can substitute a word from another language in order to explain the meaning of the English word. A simple example is “chair”.
If the child doesn’t grasp what chair means, show him one and give him the linguistic equivalent of the word. In that way, he doesn’t learn the English word, but he gets a grasp of what you are referring to. Then repetition kicks in.
And that is one of the wonders of language, that we can convey, create and even distort meaning.
During riotous years in rural England in the 15th century, a minister announced to the king with some alarm: “Sire, the peasants are revolting.” Without blinking, the king replied: “Yes, I have been aware of that for some time now.”
And what about the Labourite who castigated a Tory minister by saying: “But, sire, you must accept our suggestion for improving the economy. It is plain and simple.” Without flinching, the Tory Lord said loftily: “That is exactly why we reject it. It is plain. And simple.”
I confess that I often fell back on the hidden and snide, using the subtleties which are available, whether by execution or as reference.
One example is to say to an audience: “Half of you are idiots.” When a howl of rejection breaks out, you calmly retract and say: “Alright. I withdraw and change my statement. Half of you are not idiots.”
Translations also provide humour, as does misreading a question or an instruction. For example, a written instruction is: Motivate your answer. The student writes: “Go, answer! Go, boy!” Or a child thinks in one language and writes in another.
When describing a fight, an English Second language child reported that one boy was “thundering” the other. It’s funny when you remember that in Afrikaans “donder” means noise, and not what the answer proffered.
Another idiosyncratic event that can occur in English is to write a whole novel without using its most commonly used letter, “e”. There is one, Gadsby, by Ernest Vincent Wright and published in 1939. I don’t have much space left. But consider the following. Ask a 5-year old to write the word “cat”. He proudly presents you with “tca”.
To help him, you ask him to point out what he has written. If he responds by correctly pointing at a cat, or a picture of a cat, which of the two of you have a problem?
That is why I love the language. More next time, if you can stand it.
* Literally Yours is a weekly column from Cape Argus reader Alex Tabisher. He can be contacted on email by [email protected].
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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