Cruising For A Bruising

I better watch myself here.
I've been getting perilously close (see yesterday's comments) to open warfare with the Yanquis over language (again).
Not that there's anything wrong with that; arrogant and pedantic insult-mongery is one of my few remaining pleasures in life (that and the over-use of hyphens, adjectives and parentheses … oh, and those three little dots … er … and starting sentences with "and") …
It's just that blogs will collide again soon (hopefully in early October for the Rothko show at Tate Modern) and the next Blogville resident to hit London is a US citizen, and a formidably intelligent and well-read one at that.
But most worryingly of all she is a swim team girl and swim team girls punch hard!

Let's just sit back with a coffee and take five while we clear the air and try to reduce things from a boiling, seething, transatlantic rage to a gentle simmer with no punching involved.

First up: please don't think from yesterday's post that I am ridiculing American accents; I am not. I love them; the Boston accent so close to my own, the Noo Yoik and Noo Joisey twang, the lazy Californian consonants, the hilarious yet strangely beautiful Minnesota Nice, the glorious deep south drawl and all points between, including such delightful mixtures as our Robyn's lovely accent, born in the deep south, raised around Chicago and slipping into a local Ohio cadence when she gets angry with me (not uncommon).

Also, please don't think I am one of those idiots who insist language must stand still. I gleefully enjoy a varied and kinky sex life with the English language and acknowledge that it is a living thing and should move - enticingly slinkily - with the times.

But …
Here are a couple of archive snippets from the early part of this debate that might make my feelings a little clearer:

"… to etymology. To the derivations of words. And way back in time to the first person who pointed to a hippopotamus after a long night's drinking and named it.

As my long term blog-sufferers know, I have a real bug up my ass about the use of language.
This resulted - some years ago - in the only letter of protest I have ever written to the BBC.
I was watching the news one night and the BBC's Washington correspondent (at that time the windmill-armed, jug-eared buffoon Andrew Marr) uttered the non-word "normalcy".

NOT IN THE CONTEXT OF A QUOTE!

I recall leaping off the sofa, spuffling and sputtering with indignant rage.
This was the BBC for goodness sake! We expect standards! We expect BBC English! What we do NOT expect is a BBC news correspondent speaking gibberish! The BBC's motto is NOT "Nation Shall Speak Gibberish Unto Nation".
At least it wasn't the last time I looked …

And so I rattled off a furious epistle to the Beeb, explaining the derivation of this obscenity and demanding summary execution for Marr (a course of action regrettably not followed).

This linguistic excresence had first tumbled clumsily out of the mouth of one Warren Gamaliel Harding, twenty-ninth President of our lamentably lost colonies and the man who started the appalling avalanche of ignorance that has culminated in the present incumbent of that office being unable even to pronounce his middle initial: namely the monumentally incompetent George Walker Bush.

Even in Harding's own day his call for a "return to normalcy" was derided; not for its intent, but for its linguistic gaucherie.
Here is e.e.cummings on Harding's passing in 1923:
"The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead."
And H.L Mencken:
"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Splendid!

The thing that most bugs me about "normalcy" however, is that the word itself encourages ignorance; it actually forces human intelligence to take a step backward.
"Normality" - the word Harding's floundering mind must have been groping for - is of course derived from the French "normalité". Not much of a leap there.
After the Norman conquest, a vast word-hoard of French was absorbed into the English language; already a melting pot of Celtic, Breton, Saxon and many others, with Latin as the written norm.
Language is a living thing and it evolves with usage, but the basic meaning of any word is revealed through its etymology. You can trace its roots back through English, French, Latin, Greek, whatever; eventually - in our case - to Indo-Aryan.
When a word such as "normality/normalité" is altered - whether through ignorance or design - it loses part of its meaning. It has taken a step toward becoming a mere abstract symbol; an arbitrary amalgam of sounds to which nobody other than the person who produced it can attach any meaning.
This is the road to chaos. And it would render the Times Crossword even more mind-buggeringly difficult than it is.

The first words were felt as much as spoken. Burroughs posits that the first words were "sex" words and he could well be right. Some were undoubtedly onomatopœic; hunter-gatherer words echoing the sounds of the world around them. The Indo-Aryan word "Ma" for mother occurs in almost all languages, whether they are connected or not. What I'm trying to put across here is that words that have evolved and adapted naturally still retain their essential meanings.
Neologisms: new words for new concepts are continually being brought into existence; the common example being John Logie Baird's coining of the term "television", from the Greek "tele" for "distant, and the Latin "visio" for "seeing". Some people even more pedantic than me insist that neologisms should only be formed from the same language roots, but even - like television - if they are not, then, like all naturally evolved words, some idea of their meaning can be still gauged from their roots.
The French suffixes "…ité" and "…cy" have historially derived and separate usages. Confusing them merely creates confusion and the nuance of meaning is lost.

Having said that, dicking around with language is great fun. It is what writers and poets do. It is what the kid down the street does.
Language moves forward; meaning is refined and even redefined. This is a good thing. I myself have even been party to linguistic debauchery, having once been caught using the word "party" as a verb (yikes)!
"Normalcy" when used by a bumbling President is funny; when used by the BBC - arbiters of the English Language - it is a crime against reason. An irrevocable step down the path to ignorance. They now use it with alarming frequency; proof positive that accusations of their "dumbing down" are well founded.
Twats.

Okay. Mister Pedantic can go back in his box now. Just don't use "normalcy" around me unless you want a slap."

Hokay. So while I am happy with neologisms per se, I deplore the corruption of words through ignorance to form twisted neologisms with no trace of meaning. Admittedly not something that most Americans do but a disturbingly high proportion of their politicians are guilty of it.

Next up, we come to the real bug up my ass: Noah Webster and the dumbing down of language, literature and culture.
Back to the archives:

"The OED, by the way (for the benefit of my dear readers in the colonies) is the Oxford English Dictionary; the definitive repository of English (as opposed to American English, for which you have the esteemed Mister Noah Webster).

Digression time:
I have a great deal of respect for old Noah. He made an admirable attempt to render the horrifically complex and arcane juggernaut that is the English language more easily comprehensible to children and - necessary in a growing, multicultural nation - to the huddled masses of non-English speaking immigrants yearning to be free.

Inevitably he was forced to simplify spellings and - here's the bit that always makes me shudder - to standardise (or standardize as he would have it) suffixes.
It is this last which has just obliged Blogger to put a red line under the correct spelling and to leave Webster's abomination unscathed and my teeth gnashing.
This simplification and standardisation of suffixes - as ranted about in yesterday's polemic - has deprived Americans of a great part of the essential beauty and poetry of the English language as well as the ability to look at a word and to surmise from its Greek, Latin, French, Norse or Germanic - or other - structure, its underlying meaning.
And "color" (sorry, I had to shudder again) is not a word; it is a spelling mistake.

While I hate to appear pompous and patronising (HA! You know I LOVE IT! … and that's "patronising", NOT "patronizing", he patronised), I feel that these days, Webster's simplified spellings should be confined to teaching young children and non-English speaking immigrants, and that - once they have achieved a decent grasp of the basics - they should then advance to the correct spellings and meanings (much as Japanese children - and Japanese students such as myself - are first taught using the phonetic alphabets of ひらがな and カタカナ before moving on to the complex and beautiful Kanji which show the true meanings and concepts of what is being written)."

"American English", i.e. Noah Webster's simplified version of the language is fine as long as it is confined within the borders of the USA (although these days it really should only be used to help non-English speakers get a grasp).
What irks the many billions of English speakers (and spellers) outside those borders is the assumption by US citizens that their simplified version of the language is the standard version.
US citizens are only a small proportion of the English speakers in the world and yet we buy a computer in England, India or Australia only to find that it is set to Websterisms by default and - what is even more insulting - when you go to correct the settings you find American Simplified English is actually referred to as "English" while English itself is called "International English"!

Were Microsoft, Apple, et al to take the simple step of calling English "English" and American Simplified English "American Simplified English" (or even just "US English"), at a stroke, billions of people all around the planet would hate and resent America just a little bit less.

Oh, before I go …
National personal pronouns:
I am English.
Mme and MB are Australian.
I have never been quite sure what to call you colonials living in the States. I mean I know you are technically "Americans", but …
Check the BBC website (outside of the USA) and US news can be found under "Americas" as America stretches from the north of Alaska to the southern tip of Patagonia.
Mexicans, Canadians, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Brazilians, Chileans, Bolivians, the whole damned crew are "Americans", including US citizens, in the same way that English, French and German folk are "European".
"I am a citizen of the United States of America" is a little long winded, so why don't you guys sort yourselves out a national personal pronoun?
Something nice and snappy.
Historically, the only one I have been able to find is "Yanqui", which led to the European term for USA citizens - "Yanks" (and the current British Army rhyming slang for US soldiers of "Septics" … derived from "Septic Tank = Yank").

I can see that calling you Yanquis all the time might irk just a tad, so would one of you please clear up this glaring omission and decide upon a pronoun so that we know what to call you guys?

Right … Air cleared?
If I've calculated correctly, that rational, inoffensive and totally non-confrontational little speech should calm the Yanqui bloggers down and get them off my back.
And save me a punching come October.