#BTColumn – Magical, malleable and maddening

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by Adrian Sobers

“Tryin’ to speak the Dunn language . . .  You hooked on Mobb-phonics, Infamousbonics.” – (Prodigy, Quiet Storm)

In the introduction to his essay, Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV, Salman Rushdie recalls a conversation with a maker of fine gold jewelry.

He asked why she only worked with such an expensive material and she pointed to gold’s malleability: “You can do anything with gold, you can twist it and turn it and it will take whatever shape you want it to take.” This led him to think about the similarities between gold and the malleability of English.

“Unlike some other languages I could name, its syntactical freedom and its elasticity allow you to make of it what you will, and that this is why, as it has spread across the world, it has made so many successful local metamorphoses—into Irish English, West Indian English, Australian English, Indian English, and the many varieties of American English.” And, much to the disgust of the Guardians of Grammar, Mobb-phonics and Infamous-bonics.

But this malleability is not unique to English. David Grossman makes the case for Hebrew, “a flexible language” that “surrenders enthusiastically to all kinds of wordplay. You can talk in slang about the Bible and you can speak biblically about everyday life.” The same can be said of another biblical language, Greek.

Herod the Great executed no fewer than three sons and one wife, giving birth to the saying that it was safer to be Herod’s pig (hus) than his son (huios). But this is about English, that magical, malleable, and maddening language. We had better start at the beginning and look at language in general.

The nineteenth-century philologist Max Müller is worth quoting here, “The one great barrier between the brute and man is Language.

Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is the Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.” “English is at its core a Germanic language,” writes American linguist Arika Okrent, “and its story begins with those invading hordes.”

Very well then, we begin not with the brutes but the barbarians. In her excellent book Highly Irregular, Ms. Okrent details, among other things, the maddening tendencies of an otherwise magical language.

Highly Irregular could easily have been titled Highly Illogical. “Language also interacts with formal logic,” she writes, “the axioms and rules of inference, but it plays by its own rules. Human language utterances can mean things in a way that logic equations don’t.”

But, let’s get back to the beginning. Ms. Okrent explains, “The barbarians gave us old patterns and word-formation habits that became so entrenched that the updates passed them over when the world changed around them. The French came in, dismantled the writing system, and flooded all kinds of areas with their own vocabulary and phrasing, which persisted long after they themselves switched over to English.”

She continues, “The printing press spread certain spelling habits, and they got so firmly rooted that it was too hard to change them when the pronunciation habits changed [colonel/kernel anyone?].

The snobs made decisions about correctness based on personal taste [passed them off as actual rules] and got us to go along with them by making us feel insecure.”

Salman Rushdie, like any self-respecting writer, is not only interested in the habits of other writers, but also in what they read.

(A big part of this is just maliciousness, in the Bajan sense.) Perhaps the most notable exception to this rule was V. S. Naipaul.

During an interview at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival Naipaul was asked about the writers he read. Naipaul dispatched the question to the boundary: “I’m not a reader, I’m a writer.”
This reader (more so than writer) highly recommends Highly Irregular. Make sure to bring your maddening “whys” about English to add to Ms. Okrent’s list. As the Merovingian reminded us in Matrix Reloaded, “Why is the only real social power, without it you are powerless.”

It is still in the business of separating the powerful from the powerless. Why is ‘Y’ sometimes a vowel? Why do we order a “large” drink and not a “big” one? Why do we move slowly but not fastly? Why is it sum total and not total sum? Why is there a ‘P’ in receipt, an ‘L’ salmon, and a ‘B’ in doubt? The end of Mr. Rushdie’s essay referenced in the opening doubles as a fitting note on which to end.

It also serves as an apt description of Highly Irregular, “If you aren’t a writer, don’t worry: This book won’t teach you how to be one. If you are a writer, I suspect it will teach you a lot. Either way, it’s a treasure chest, and a delight.”

No matter where you fall on the readerwriter spectrum (perhaps you double as both), you do well to take up Ms. Okrent’s invitation to think about the magical, malleable, and maddening language we all know as, English.

Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on social issues. This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.