Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill (28 page)

Professor Lisa Jardine is one of  the country's leading academics. Her writing is provocative and inspirational, and she makes every subject she writes about interesting, informative and accessible. In
Points of View
, she states:

 

I want to use the moment as a springboard for some big ideas.

I want to stimulate and challenge the reader and seduce them into thinking differently.

 

Does it really matter that she breaks the rule on agreement in a sentence? We all know what she means and, after all, some of the greatest users of English break the rules on occasion.

 

Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit;  and since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are clear'd between you and I . . .

 

Wonderful writing, but did the great Shakespeare really write ‘you and I'? And what about Dickens, in the opening of his masterpiece,
Bleak House
?

 

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.

 

Was one of the world's greatest novelists not aware that the rules require sentences to contain proper main verbs?

My former English master, Ken Pike, quite rightly taught us the rules of spelling and grammar because such knowledge, he argued, helped the user to write clear and effective English. He also pointed out that, sometimes, rules do not apply. This was most clearly illustrated when I observed a lesson in which the English teacher taught his class that a double negative always equals a positive. To illustrate his point, he wrote on the blackboard: ‘I can't not go to the dance.' ‘This means,' he said, ‘that you would be going to the dance.' He continued, ‘There is no occasion in the English language where a double positive equals a negative.' One bright spark at the back murmured, ‘Yea, right!'

The Use of English

The comedian who spoke after me at an after-dinner event ‘entertained' the audience with the usual stories about the thick Irishman. I smiled, not because I thought this material was in the slightest bit amusing, but because it seemed to me ironic that this asinine individual had perhaps never read a book in his life, and had clearly never heard of Brendan Behan, W B Yeats, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Dean Swift, J M Synge, Oscar Wilde, Oliver Goldsmith, Frank O'Hara and the many other distinguished Irish writers.

I am a regular visitor to Ireland – North and South – and am fascinated by the way these immensely hospitable people have such a wonderful command of the English language. Ireland is a paradise for the connoisseur of the colloquial, where the idiom has qualities no less striking than those which characterise our own great county of Yorkshire. There is a unique quality of speech in Ireland – lively, colourful and expressive. My Grandma Mullarkey was a great user of the most imaginative phrases and comparisons. Here are a few examples:

‘She's so good she bites the altar rails.'

‘Sue, he hadn't a leg to stand on when they found the arms on him.'

‘Could you lend me a wee colour of milk?'

‘He'll not last long, so he won't, for there's the smell of clay on him.'

‘She has a tongue that would clip tin.'

‘You should get down on your knees and thank God you're on your feet.'

‘He's so quiet he comes into the house like a drop of soot.'

‘He has a mouth on him like a torn pocket.'

‘She has a smile like last year's rhubarb.'

‘Sure didn't I know a fella with exactly the same complaint as you –

God rest his soul.'

On a visit to a small school in Galway some years ago, I met little Bernie. The child, aged six or seven, approached the head teacher and me. ‘It's still there, Mrs Callaghan,' she informed the head teacher. ‘In the girls' toilets.'

‘Is it, Bernadette?' replied the head teacher calmly.

‘It is so, and it's got bigger.'

‘Well, I shouldn't worry about it too much. It won't hurt you.'

‘But it's got great curved claws and gigantic jagged jaws and it's turned a mouldy green.'

Mrs Callaghan smiled. ‘It can't harm you, Bernadette.'

‘But, Miss, it puts the very fear of God into me every time I looks at it.'

‘Well, don't look at it then.'

‘Sure aren't your eyes just drawn to it?'

I could not restrain myself. ‘What is it?' I asked, fascinated by this exchange.

‘Sure isn't it a monster, a great, dark, green, frightening monster with popping eyes and sharp teeth,' said the girl, without seeming to draw breath.

‘A monster!' I exclaimed.

‘In the girls' toilets,' she added.

‘A monster in the toilets?' I repeated.

She patted my arm. ‘Sure it's not a real monster,' she chuckled. ‘It's a great dark stain from water leaking through the roof, but it gives me the shivers right enough just to look at it.'

The head teacher explained that the flat roof always leaked after heavy rain, and that the water had left an ugly stain on the walls of the girls' toilets. It had grown in size.

‘Is it a very bad leak?' I asked the child.

Before Mrs Callaghan could respond, the small girl piped up: ‘A bad leak? Sure it'd baptise you!'

Spelling it Out  

The chairman of governors tut-tutted as he looked through the applications at the interview for the headship of the school.

‘It's a great pity, Mr Phinn,' he said, ‘that the standards of spelling have declined so much since I was at school.' He pointed to a letter of application in which the word ‘liaison' had been spelt incorrectly. ‘Even head teachers can't spell these days,' he bemoaned.

‘“Liaison” is a difficult word,' I said, in the applicant's defence, ‘and I think you will agree that we all have problems with certain words at one time or another.'

I was recalling the time when I got my new laptop and sent a letter to a school which should have begun, ‘Dear Headmaster', but inadvertently went out beginning, ‘Dear Headamster'. Fortunately, the recipient had a wry sense of humour and replied, ‘Dear Gerbil'.

‘Mr Phinn,' said the chairman of governors, pompously, ‘I don't have any difficulty. I pride myself on being a very good speller. I have no problem with spelling.'

Well, bully for him, I thought, but I bet he does. He, like many I have met who think they are excellent spellers, suffered from something of a delusion. None of us is a perfect speller and occasionally even the best of us has a problem. I was tempted to give him my ‘little test' of thirty commonly used words, which I have set on my English courses to teachers to demonstrate the loveable lunacies of the English spelling system. Should that be ‘loveable', ‘lovable', or can it be both? You see what I mean.

If every word in English were spelt (or should that be ‘spelled', or can it be both?) the way it sounds, it would be so much easier, but this is not the case. One in ten words is not spelt the way it sounds, and many of the non-phonic words are amongst those most frequently used in the language – words like ‘the', ‘of',
‘one', ‘two', ‘could', ‘shall', ‘ought', ‘woman', ‘women', ‘write' and ‘people'. One could never solve the spelling of ‘could' by trying to relate its letters to its sounds. I recall a clever child once asking me, ‘So why is the word “phonics” not spelt the way it sounds?'

 

 

Once, in an infant school, I came across a most inventive little speller who had written ‘EGOG' at the top of the page.

‘What does this say?' I enquired (or should that be ‘inquired', or can it be both?)

‘Can't you read?' she asked.

‘I can,' I replied, ‘but I am not sure about this word.'

She sighed. ‘'Edgehog,' I was told.

G B Shaw famously demonstrated the wild phonetic inconsistency of English by pointing out that if English spelling were phonetically consistent, then the spelling of ‘fish' might be ‘ghoti': ‘gh' as in ‘laugh', ‘o' as in ‘women' and ‘ti' as in ‘station'.

English is a rich and poetic language but is more complex, irregular and eccentric than most other written languages and is arguably the most difficult European language to read and write. This is what makes it so fascinating.

Now, I guess you are wondering which thirty tricky and troublesome words make up my ‘little test'. Well, here they are. You might like to try them out on family and friends, but be warned – the exercise is likely to cause some argument, so have a dictionary handy.

 

Asinine, liquefy, purify, rarefy, pavilion, vermilion, moccasin, inoculate, impresario, resuscitate, supersede, rococo, mayonnaise, cemetery, titillate, desiccate, sacrilegious, impostor, consensus, minuscule, bureaucracy, canister, predilection, tranquillity, psittacosis, harass, unforeseen, linchpin.

Changing the Canary's Water

I once visited a convent high school. Before leaving I enquired of the headmistress, a small bright-eyed little nun, if I might wash my hands. She directed me to a room with nothing more than a row of hooks and a small washbasin in it.

I returned to her study. ‘Actually, Sister,' I said, rather embarrassed, ‘I was wanting the toilet.'

‘Why didn't you say you needed the lavatory, Mr Phinn?' she said, with a wry smile. I am certain she knew what I meant in the first place but was just being mischievous.

There must be hundreds of euphemistic descriptions for the toilet: ‘the little boys' room', the place where one ‘spends a penny', ‘powders one's nose', ‘sees a man about a dog'. It's called the ‘convenience', ‘comfort station', ‘rest room', ‘cloakroom', ‘smallest room in the house', ‘facility', ‘loo', ‘necessary'. When I was in America, I heard it frequently referred to as ‘the john' and the ‘WC' and once, interestingly, as ‘the honey bucket'. I am reliably informed that, when members of the royal family wish ‘to pay a visit', they inform their hosts that they ‘wish to retire'. Mark, my editor at the
Dalesman
, tells me that in Spain a customary phrase is: ‘
Me voy a cambiar del aqua al canario
' (‘I am going to change the canary's water'). Perhaps the most elegant of euphemisms for visiting the lavatory is, surprisingly, a naval one. The officer would excuse himself from the table with the phrase: ‘I am going to shed a tear for Nelson.'

The most interesting euphemistic description was told to me by Nigel Rees, who devised and chairs the Radio 4 programme,
Quote . . . Unquote
. We were speaking at the
Yorkshire Post
Literary Lunch last year, and he amused the audience with the story of the rather precious woman, who, when she wished to visit the said place, would tell her companions that she was ‘going to turn the vicar's bike around'.

I was once inspecting a primary school in Harrogate, and the formidable infant head teacher, a woman of great expertise and long experience, informed me that she had once been approached by a mother of two children in the school who was the very mistress of the euphemism. The parent in question had been in to see her, complaining that her daughter had told her there was only tracing paper in the girls' toilets. It was, in fact, the good old-fashioned shiny IZAL paper that I remember well as a child. Her daughter, explained the mother, liked the ‘soft tissue variety'. When the girl's small brother started in the infants, the parent had appeared again.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Smith,' the parent said. ‘Could I have a word?' She explained that sometimes, when her small son went ‘for a little tinkle', he ‘got his little nipper caught in his little zipper'. The teacher arched an eyebrow. ‘So I was wondering,' continued the parent, ‘if you could oversee his “performance”.' The teacher explained that were she to ‘oversee' all the children's ‘performances' when they went ‘for a little tinkle', she would be there all day and suggested that the child be sent to school in trousers without a zip.