Cocktails and Records

A funny thing happened to me on the way home this evening… something that I’ve only ever seen happen ‘abroad’.

You see, a woman rushed up to me at my local suburban train station tonight as I was approaching the escalators. She explained in a peculiar mixture of frantic embarrassment that she had too much luggage to take by herself, that she was kind of scared she might fall down the escalator and could I help her until her husband arrived. So I took a suitcase and a bag, and once at the foot of the escalator, I assisted her in stacking a somewhat formidable pile of luggage while we waited for her husband to come down with their baby. I then pointed them in the direction of central London, they thanked me and we went off our separate ways.

The odd thing was that this all happened in French.

As much as I’ve cringed at some of my fellow English speaking natives shameless usage  of the  ‘loud and slow’ dialect in other countries, I don’t think anyone has ever just randomly started speaking to me in another language whilst in the UK or Australia.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that I could communicate with her (especially considering my poor relationship with my French classes over the past year) or the fact that she just assumed that everyone at the station spoke French and wasn’t in the faintest bit taken aback that I did. Perhaps some people think higher of the foreign language speaking skills of this country than we do. Either that, or fear of the escalator conquers all.

How do you feel about exclamation marks?

I read something about exclamation marks in the Guardian yesterday which helped me understand my hypocritical relationship with them.

You see, at work I spend quite a bit of my time deleting them from other people’s writing. I have even written a fascist style guide outlawing them except under all but the most extenuating circumstances. At work, I think exclamation marks look puppy doggishly over-excited, unprofessional and hyperbolic. ‘Six out of ten of our visitors think that the new pot plants look great!’. Indeed.

But at home, at home… exclamation marks are my guilty secret. They litter my emails and hand written notes (‘Remember to buy bread!’) and I battle to keep them out of this blog. On dark days, I even use double and triple exclamation marks.

However, as Stuart Jeffries article notes, this is because exclamation marks are friendly. They add emotion and friendliness to a plain old boring dull sentence. I’d like to think that this theory explains away my addiction to exclamation marks in my private life.

Work is another matter though, and I feel increasingly alone in my raging against the exclamation mark in the workplace. I fear what will happen when exclamation marks take over the world of work. When you’re free to shamelessly use an exclamation mark in the work domain, where do you go next for that added touch of friendliness outside of it? It’s like swear words losing their impact through over-use.

If we don’t act now to stop the rise of exclamation marks in the professional world, there’s a good chance we’ll be using emoticons in every day written language in a few years time and I’ll be deleting them from work reports not long after that.

Terrible !! ;)

A few years ago I visited Skipton Castle in Skipton, North Yorkshire. Although this lovely part of Yorkshire gets more than its fair share of visitors, Skipton Castle I think it would be fair to say, does not yet quite register on the international ‘must-see destination’ list. Put it this way, it is not the Louvre, the Forbidden City, the Statue of Liberty or the Tower of London.

Despite this, the Castle was geared up for an international audience and offered an impressive range of written guides in several languages – English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese and Esperanto. Taking a rather battered looking English guide, I couldn’t help but notice that the Esperanto version still looked as pristine as the day it came from the printers.

Since that trip to Skipton Castle, I’ve often thought of those neglected Esperanto guides with amusement, wondering who on Earth speaks this contrived international language. Well, today my curiosity got the better of me and I finally turned to the worlds favourite source of (mis)information, wikipedia, only to discover that there are actually 200 to 2000 native Esperanto speakers (as many as that?!), 10,000 fluent speakers and 100,000 active speakers. Esperanto is also apparently on the school curriculum in China, Hungary and Bulgaria. You’d think that English, French, Spanish or indeed Chinese would be more useful but hey, why not be optimistic?

For Esperanto is a language based on optimism if nothing else. esperanto.net tells me that it is a language ‘designed to facilitate communication between people of different lands and cultures’ because ‘unlike national languages, Esperanto allows communication on an equal footing between people, with neither having the usual cultural advantage favouring a native speaker.’ Fair enough.

The funny thing for me is that despite its promise of simplicity and no irregular verbs, I would prefer to struggle away with my failing French and lapsed Japanese than learn something that was invented by a Polish eye specialist in 1887. There is something beautiful and grounded in the organic nature of language and although all those quirky irregular verbs don’t actively help promote world peace, they probably reflect our complex lives more than contrived scientific constructions.

But here’s to Skipton Castle’s embracing of Esperanto. You don’t get that at the Tower of London.

Here’s a word you don’t hear very often – ‘wicked’*. I realised this when I was watching the excellent film Tiger Bay (from 1959) last week and Hayley Mills said something like ‘But he’s such a terribly wicked man’.

The thought occurred to me again the next day as I spent a pleasant morning at the Charles Dickens Museum. Dickens’ characters regularly accused others or berated themselves for being wicked. Even trees could have wicked thoughts – you probably wouldn’t get an author writing this these days:

‘As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind . . . ‘ (from David Copperfield)

A quick search of IMDB reveals that although there have been a number of movies with wicked in the title in recent decades, there was a glut of them in the early years of cinema – A Wicked Bounder (1906), His Wicked Eyes (1919), The Wicked City (1916, 1926), The Wicked Cat (1922), Wild and Wicked (1923), Wicked Kashmir (1928), and my favourite Winky Waggles the Wicked Widow (1914), to name but a few. Again, blockbuster musicals not withstanding, you’re not getting many films about wicked bounders at the moment.

Based on this spurious research, it seems that the use of the word ‘wicked’ to describe the evil and the morally suspect has fallen into decline. Perhaps this is due to the decreasing influence of religion. Or perhaps people just aren’t wicked anymore. They’re just b*stards.

*Obviously, that’s wicked meaning ‘bad’ rather than wicked meaning ‘good’, although even that’s pretty passé now.

Some time ago I was in the pub with a work colleague. I bored him about about the most underrated bands in world (that would be Teenage Fanclub, The Go-Betweens and XTC I say somewhat predictably) and in return he told me about linguist Steven Pinker.

Having a minor interest in both linguistics and evolutionary theory, I dutifully wrote down his name in my diary and suprised both of us by actually reading The Language Instinct, Pinker’s book on how language is biologically innate. I’ve just now finished reading a cheapy Penguin excerpt called ‘The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television’ from his most recent book The Stuff of Thought. It’s all about swearing so obviously I found it even more interesting.

Here are some of Steven Pinker’s thoughts which particularly captivated me. Look away now if you don’t like cussing.

1. The historical root of cursing in English is religious, or rather the time when religious threats actually meant something. For example, the modern day equivalent of ‘Go to hell’ for those who don’t necessarily believe in a nether-world of searing flames, agonising thirst, terrifying ghouls and blood curdling shrieks might be ‘I hope you suffer a stroke and spend your life drooling and twisted in a wheelchair’.
2. Scumbag originally meant condom. This might be obvious to everyone else but I’ve been in the dark all this time.
3. Unlike most other words, swear words are stored in the right side of the brain. This side is thought to store memorized chunks (like song lyrics) and to be more involved in producing negative emotions.
4. The word ‘fuck’ is one of the most flexible words around. It functions as a noun, an adjective, a verb and an adverb, yet isn’t really any of them. It also works in completely ungrammatical phrases like ‘Fuck you’, ‘What the fuck?’ and ‘Abso-fucking-lutely’. No other words have quite such unique characteristics.
5. Here’s a great Yiddish curse: ‘May all of your teeth fall out but one, so you can have a toothache.’
6. The English language practically encourages you to swear. By offering no neutral terms for words like flatulence or feces for example, you’re forced to choose between very formal stuffy words or swearing. So it’s not really my fault if I swear all the time…

As we all know, language is an interesting creature, with words bending and shaping their meanings and pronunciations over the years. New words and phrases that have developed in your own lifetime can be particularly interesting.

Like ‘man flu’.

To me, these two words combined indicate a condition where someone (‘a man’) claims to have, or behaves like they have, a severe form of influenza (‘the flu’) when in reality they’re just overreacting to a plain old cold (‘man flu‘). In its feeding of clichés about men being pathetic seekers of sympathy for trivial illnesses and women being able to handle pain better, I had always assumed that the expression was obviously pejorative, disparaging and dismissive towards men, albeit in a non-malicious way.

Over the past year though, I have noticed an increasing number of men using the term to describe themselves. For example, just last week someone explained to me, with a straight face, that they had been absent from work because they had ‘man flu’.

Now either men are reclaiming ‘man flu’ in the same way that gay people have reclaimed ‘queer’ and African Americans use the ‘n’ word, or there are a lot of people missing the point. Or perhaps I am.

There has been an exciting addition to my life this week which is calming the web obsessed side of me. Yes, my new Michel Thomas Advanced French course has arrived in the mail from my good friends at Amazon. It promises to make learning French grammar easy. And perhaps because I’ve only listened to half of the relatively easy first disc so far, it seems to be working. Repeat now: Je veux envoyer une lettre a Jean Pierre. Je veux lui envoyer une lettre. Je veux la lui envoyer.

Anyway, my revisiting of both French and Japanese recently has got me musing on the profound ridiculousness of the English language. I like English. It is a flexible, flowing language with an astonishingly rich vocabulary and a high tolerance for bastardisation by Americans. However, it is littered with quite frankly bizarre stuff:

The whole ‘aught’ thing. Caught, taught, bought (that’s bought with an ‘ought to be difficult). It’s like that just to look pretty isn’t it?

Phrases which mean something, but at the same time, don’t. One of my very favourite English language expressions is ‘be that as it may’. As an idiom it’s a decorative way of actually saying something meaningful, but if you look at it too hard at it for too long it just turns into an apparently random concoction of short words which make no logical sense whatsoever.

Polite versus non-polite language. English speakers moan about having to learn other languages informal and formal verb conjugations but at least you know where you’re at with them. What’s the polite way of speaking to someone in English? Not swearing?! It’s all so very painfully subtle.Thank God English is my first language is all I can say.