Cocktails and Records

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.