I was talking recently to one of my neighbours and he told me he and his wife were going to spend their holidays in a place he called ‘Mumbai’. I asked if he would also be visiting Chennai and Kolkata and he looked puzzled. I pointed out that these were the local Indian names for Madras and Calcutta respectively and that if we British are going to express our post-colonial guilt by reverting to local names for places, we should at least be consistent in adopting these names and not just follow the fashions of the British media. Also, if we go beyond the old Empire and visit Russia we don’t talk of going to Moskva, nor is it customary to pronounce the name of the French capital as Paree.
What has happened of course is that my neighbour has ‘tagged’ his discourse with a symbol intended to show his multicultural credentials, along with a sub-text of “God, what a terrible thing that Empire was! Look how I’m making the effort to use your names in an attempt to say sorry. Please love us now that Britain in poor and in debt and we need your investment”.
Another case where language formulae reveal a lack of knowledge is the pronunciation in British English of the variations of the word ‘harass’ as in ‘sexual harASSment’. The formulation of the concept of sexual harassment as a social problem was a valuable outcome of the feminist movement in the USA, where the pronunciation is ‘harASS’. As we know, ever since the First World War, when America has sneezed Britain has said “Bless you” and so the concept of sexual harassment (and later other variations) soon crossed the Atlantic, where the semi-literate who were unfamiliar with words at the intellectual level of ‘HARass’ (in British English pronunciation) had no idea of how to say the word and so followed the American pattern.
To those with ears attuned to accents an interesting phenomenon has appeared over the last fifteen years or so in the spoken language of young, middle-class Englishwomen. This is the introduction of a weak ‘yod’ (the vowel /i:/ or the semi-vowel /j/) before the phoneme /u:/, especially in the word ‘you’, which is pronounced ‘yiu’, as in “Can I help yiu?”. It also creeps into the verb ‘do’, as in “How do yiu diu?” These young people probably do not realise what they are doing; they are simply adopting formulae of social identity just as they adopt the physical formulae of identity by buying the clothes and makeup they find in magazines aimed at the market they represent.
It is interesting that this mainly appears in female discourse because theoretically English does not distinguish between male and female speakers, whereas some nations and tribes have different languages for men and for women. However, I have noticed that in Spain women in Madrid turn the ‘s’ sound into ‘sh’ in certain words.
Television is a transmitter of these patterns and sometimes creates its own formulae. Two examples have become common in recent years. The first is the automatic official response to loss of life, where some unfortunate PR person is landed with the task of saying: "Our thoughts go out to the relatives" of murder victims or whatever, and the second is when the news is given of the death of a member of the Armed Forces: "His/her relatives have been informed". What is tedious about these formulae is that they are completely meaningless and exist only as a kind of signal that says: "We are dealing with tragedy here". The first is a total lie: the thoughts of relevant authorities very rarely "go out" to anyone, and the second is totally irrelevant: obviously the dead person’s relatives have been informed before the news item goes out and whether they have or not remains a matter of complete indifference to the general public. Television crime fiction from the USA is bringing us the phrase: "I'm sorry for your loss" and it will be interesting to see if this infiltrates into common usage in Britain.
I was at a rugby match recently and had the misfortune to sit next to one of those boring young men who insist on sharing his own take on the game with all those in earshot. It was interesting to note the number of phrases he used that are normally only heard in television commentaries: "He's usually good with ball in hand" and "Oh, good skills there!” As if we Welsh supporters don't suffer enough from watching ‘our lads’ underperform, we now have to put up with instant commentary in the stands.
We also have formulae that try to imply an air of professionalism (were usually professionalism does not exist) as in "These bargains available in store now" and "The programme airs at 5 pm" and the related "It’s on air now". Had I but world enough and time I would try to track down the originators of this nonsense but time’s chariot is at my back and there are more important things to do in life. In moments of leisure, however, it is amusing to draw a mental picture of the updated David Brent figure responsible: today he would have the obligatory shaven head, the Subaru Impreza and a three-button suit jacket with the top two buttons done up.
And then we have those people who are only one step up the food chain from graffiti-vandals, those who proclaim details of their personal lives through the medium of car stickers. I have sometimes thought of setting up a small company to manufacture car stickers, or perhaps we might call them anti-car stickers. The first would be: "So your baby is on board. Now what do I do?" Then we might try: "I don't own a horse so I don't care whether you slow down for them or not". This would form part of a general campaign against the smugness that produces the "Baby on board" or "I slow down for horses" stickers that are really saying: "I have a baby, so there" or "I'm rich enough to own a horse, or at least my daughter’s in the Pony Club". In real life, I did see a beautiful sticker in Brazil some years ago that read: "Next time let's vote for the bitches because their sons have done nothing for us". Also in real life, I was once leaving my office to go to lunch and noticed a sticker on a car parked in the street that read: “Abortion kills”, so I returned to the office and printed on a sheet of paper “So does over-population” and taped it to the vehicle.
Do any of these points take us any further than the ramblings of a grumpy old man? Actually they do, and here I am backed up by George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language in which he shows how lazy language leads to lazy thinking and lazy thinking in its turn can lead to oppression. We may say that subtle variations in accent on the part of teenage girls in England are not particularly important but we have seen how the rise of tribalism among young people, fostered by certain social contact programmes on the Internet, has led to violence and suicide among teenage girls and accent is one of the most significant markers of tribal difference. The recent dismissal from an American television series of a young woman from the north-east of England called Cheryl Cole because of her accent, before she had even started work, is interesting from this point of view. I am certain her extremely attractive accent would have been perfectly intelligible to the US audience; the problem was that it was an unfamiliar accent from outside the group of tribes acceptable to US television executives practising their own form of isolationism.
Another point of Orwell's essay is that formulaic language can be used to manipulate the masses. This tends to occur most often in periods of armed conflict and the military are masters of this, with their ‘collateral damage’ and ‘blue on blue strikes’, but these terms have spread in our politically correct times so that we now have ‘social housing’, meaning ‘homes for the poor’ and ‘ethnic minorities’, which almost always applies to coloured minorities rather than, say, Polish immigrants. Life is too short for us to even begin to tackle the phraseology of political correctness, so we'll let that one lie for the moment. After I first published this essay online I was watching some nonsense action film on television where they used the pretentious phrase "I have you visual" - another bit of pseudo-professional jargon meaning 'I see you' that goes along with 'Affirmative' or 'Roger that' for 'Yes'. People who use radios may say that 'Yes' is too short a word and might get lost in transmission in less-than-perfect conditions, but 'Yes I do' or 'Yes I can' would be perfectly effective. Do US lorry-drivers still use CB radios? At least their jargon, which came to us in the 1980s, seemed to be slightly self-mocking and came up with the wonderful word 'negatory' for 'no'.
The great wave of the use of the word ‘community’ seems to have passed but in its heyday it represented a classic attempt at social marketing. Ever since the Industrial Revolution began to systematically destroy traditional communities, a situation ironically made worse by later well-meaning but misguided attempts at renovating slum housing, we have seen urban life in Britain evolve into social wasteland. At some point in the 1960s the decision was taken to include the word ‘community’ in government documents at every opportunity in the hope that, like the speck of grit in an oyster, the very word would attract the ethos of mutual help, street parties, Pearly Kings and Queens and the Harvest Festivals beloved of Prime Minister John Major's little old ladies cycling to church. In response to calls for more ‘bobbies on the beat’ we were given the ‘community policeman’, though if you could ever locate one of these characters in the event of an emergency or a crime you would be doing very well indeed.
Is there hope? Not, I think in our generation. The problem lies in the example I gave above of the young man at a rugby game: broadcast and print media have such a central part in our lives that it takes a strong (or grumpy) personality to stand against the formulaic phraseology that represents formulaic thinking. Going back to Orwell, one of his recommendations for good writing is: if you find yourself using a phrase you have read before, strike it out.
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