Everyday Language and Everyday Life

Richard Hoggart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351323789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

For years Richard Hoggart has observed the oddity of a common speech habit: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths, a disinclination to form our own sentences "from scratch, " unless that becomes inescapable. But in this book he is interested in more specific questions. How far do the British, and particularly the English, share the same sayings across the social classes? If each group uses some different ones, are those differences determined by location, age, occupation or place in the social scale? Over the years, did such sayings indicate some of the main lines of their culture, its basic conditions, its stresses and strains, its indications of meaning, and significance? These and other concerns animate this fascinating exploration of how the English, and particularly working-class English, use the English language.Hoggart sets the stage by explaining how he has approached his subject matter, his manner of inquiry, and the general characteristics of sayings and speech. Looking back into time, he explores the idioms and epigrams in the poverty setting of the early working-class English. Hoggart examines the very innards of working-class life and the idioms, with the language that arose in relation to home, with its main characters of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, and children; the wars; marriage; food, drink, health, and weather; neighbors, gossip, quarrels, old age, and death. He discusses related idioms and epigrams and their evolution from prewar to present.Hoggart identifies the sayings and special nuances of the English working-class people that have made them identifiable as such, from the rude and obscene to the intellectual and imaginative. Hoggart also examines the areas of tolerance, local morality, and public morality, elaborating on current usage of words that have evolved from the fourteen through the eighteenth centuries. He touches on religion, superstition, and time, the beliefs that animate language. And finally, he focuses on aphorisms and social change and the emerging idioms of relativism, concluding that many early adages still in use seem to refuse to die.With inimitable verve and humor, Hoggart offers adages, apothegms, epigrams and the like in this colorful examination drawn from the national pool and the common culture. This volume will interest scholars and general readers interested in culture studies, communications, and education.

1
Beginnings

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

— E. M. Forster (attributed)

Approaches

I belatedly realise that, if only half-consciously, I have been registering for years the oddity of one common speech habit. That is: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths; a disinclination to form our own sentences ‘from scratch’, unless that becomes inescapable.

How far do the British, but particularly the English, share the same sayings right across the social classes; and if each group uses some different ones (though, on a first look, probably not many), are those differences decided by location, age, occupation and place in the social scale? Within each group, what decides which forms of conventional speech are most used and with what, if any, different degrees of emphasis?

The next step was to enquire whether, by looking at a particular group’s phrasings, one might understand better how its members saw or simply responded to the most important elements in their lives. Did such sayings, taken together, indicate some of the main lines of their culture, its basic conditions, its stresses and strains, its indications of meaning, of significance, and so on.

To do that for a whole society would be an enormous undertaking, would mean sifting and ‘better sifting’ (to adopt a popular working-class formulation) through hundreds of sayings until, one might hope, the shape of a particular but very complex and varied set of overlapping cultures emerged. That could be a lifetime’s work even if one restricted it to a small country such as England. But ‘small’ there obviously gives a false perspective. Though small in size, England manifestly has a long and rich history, and its language reflects that. Best—essential, for an amateur without access to elaborate computers—to narrow the focus. In my case, to focus on the Northern English working class of my childhood.

My memory is still full of their patterns of speech; some I still use day-by-day. How did we characteristically talk to each other in Hunslet, Leeds, and what did our talk tell about the ways we responded to our common experiences? What psychological shape did it all make; what did it reveal about our hopes and fears and our responses to them? I expect to stray widely on the way; especially into the war years and after; and will, as the material prompts, move across different social classes.

But that was how this book began, by looking at the prewar Northern working class; and that is also why the next chapter, the first of single-minded substance, is about being poor at that time and place. Behind that and other chapters, all the time, is the question of how much of that habitual speech survives into the very different circumstances of today; and what those sayings which are retained and those newly minted tell us. Towards the end that matter of the newly minted will be broached, but only lightly.

In A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, Alan Watkins has a nice observation on what has elsewhere been called ‘breeze-block speech’, by which we put our conversation together as a series of loosely linked, immediately-to-hand chunks: ‘Real writers write in words; most literate people in recognisable blocks of words; and politicians, commonly, in whole prefabricated sentences or sometimes paragraphs’.

Most of us fall into a sub-division of the third group, into a simpler and less self-conscious version, as befits those who are not politicians or other kinds of public figures. Our speech is like a verbal equivalent of those snakes that children make with dominoes on a table, or interlocking parts in a very long but thin jig-saw, or a kind of continuous-prefabricated-strip of sticky verbal labels. Many of us rarely utter a sentence which has an individually chosen subject, object and verb; or includes one simple adjective to indicate a quality or characteristic; nor would we often venture on a free, self-chosen adverb. We move by jumping as if over a very tricky stream from handy metaphor or image to handy borrowed phrase; spoken hopscotch. It is both time- and worry-saving, and usually livelier, to say: ‘It’s like finding a needle in a haystack’; or: ‘They’re leaving in droves’; or ‘That’s just the tip of the iceberg’, rather than putting together the necessary syntactical, non-metaphorical, bits and pieces.

All this is most helpful at grave or embarrassing moments, when we wish to skirt round a naked harsh truth. We would prefer not to say, straight: ‘He is very old indeed and not likely to see the year out’, since that can leave us feeling slightly rude and crude. We take refuge in a range of euphemisms, such as ‘He can’t be very long for this world’. That is only marginally softer than the more direct form, but it serves. It serves better than the blunt: ‘He’s on his last legs’. You would not use that in talking to one of his relatives; you might in the streets.

Evasion is naturally demanded at the death-bed. Auden deliberately avoided it. He used to tell how he went into the room where his father was dying and said: ‘You know you are dying, father’. That would have been thought cruel in our district. It may be that Auden, as a devout and direct Christian, went on to suggest a proper Christian way for his father to pass his last hours; that that was more important to him than equivocation.

In other circumstances we may not be wholly evading. We may be merely lazy; or wish not too obviously to be ‘laying it on the line’; or, conversely, may prefer to use an image sharper than our own speech to do our work for us. We are greatly ‘taken by’ alliterative couplings: ‘fish, flesh, fowl or good red herring’, ‘hale and hearty’, ‘kith and kin’, ‘safe and sound’.

We do not say directly: ‘She is a very proud woman’ but ‘She’s as proud as a peacock’; that is usually simple laziness, almost a tic, taking the bit from the box. We avoid saying; ‘He is a greedy child’, which is hard to utter politely; oddly, we may prefer ‘His eyes are bigger than his belly’; which strengthens the accusation, but can be safely invoked as a piece of acceptable, as much indulgent as rude, folk-language. Of a mean man the choice might well be: ‘He wouldn’t even give you the skin off his rice pudding’; which is pictorially witty; the homely comic touch slightly leavens the unavoidable harshness of a straightforward ‘mean’. We hesitate to say flatly: ‘He’s a crook’, even though he clearly is; instead, we say, ‘He’d rob you as soon as look at you’, which is both witty and cogent.

It is easy to identify evasion and laziness. Less common is that search for jokiness and colour, which are almost always borrowed from unknown wordsmiths. Old or new, all have to have at least one kind of attraction. The best are neat beyond all substitution. ‘Wise after the event’ would not be easy to replace economically and memorably.

So we jump from verbal stepping-stone to verbal stepping-stone over the deep and murky waters of the linguistic sea. We try to escape the need for a logically expressed succession in our speech; for that we hardly ever feel ready. We prefer the instantly available and comprehensible image. Recently, an executive on the radio spoke of someone or some idea which ‘beat a path to my door’ instead of saying, for instance, ‘he/it could not be ignored’. Emerson’s phrase, about the resulting stream of visitors to a man who has made a better mousetrap (Elbert Hubbard also claimed authorship) is much more vividly memorable. It is unlikely that more than one in a hundred who still makes use of it knows where the fancy came from. The same is true of Dr. Johnson’s observation on a man’s reaction to the prospect of hanging: ‘it concentrates his mind wonderfully’.

Current and very frequent examples can be found in letters sent to those ‘feedback’ programmes so popular on the radio today. Most of the writers are firm for one ideological position or another (like that stock-figure ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’); they have honed a style for their indignation almost entirely made up of phrases so worn with use that they have become deplorable cliches. They could very easily be put on a computer’s floppy or hard disk for regular use. They are predictable, portentous and do not advance their arguments; they are packeted slogans, like insults hurled in a school playground or at Hyde Park Corner. It might be interesting to hear the broadcasters explain what principles of selection they use, and define what purpose they think they serve. We may be sure that some such phrase as ‘the voice of the people’ would be invoked; that could be in one sense true, or it might be yet another example of sub-democratic special pleading.

So we reach for tags out of that almost bottomless box which history, geography, age, and our social class have handed to us. We take refuge, without always realising that that is what we are doing, in adages, epigrams, maxims, apophthegms, proverbs, saws, sayings, truisms, commonplaces, mottoes, axioms, conventional locutions. There are differences between all these, but, for the purposes of this book, I will draw on all of them; they have much in common.

In The Rotters’ Club, Jonathan Coe produces a painful parody of refuge-cliches from an abused husband: ‘I said, “Barbara, we’ve reached a crossroads. This is the end of the road. It’s him or me,” I said. “You have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.” I told her straight out. “You can’t have your cake and eat it.’“

‘And what did she say to that?’

‘She told me to stop talking in cliches’.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, Eric Partridge was already listing among newcomers several which remain in full rampant bloom today, such as: ‘In this day and age’. That must, he says, at first have sounded sonorous and dignified, but by now ‘implies mental decrepitude and marks a man for the rest of his life’. ‘Its mentally retarded offspring’, he adds, is ‘At this point in time’.

Sources

A very large number of adages in general use today have come, often not much modified, from many centuries ago, especially from Greek and Latin authors. Many also come from a long-gone rural life, and draw on what was and sometimes still is regarded as undeniable folk wisdom—English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish wisdom, of course—though many can be found across Europe and others even much more widely. Folk wisdom can be more parochial in its thinking than in many of its origins.

No one in a packed working-class district of an English city in the Thirties seemed to find anything archaic or out of place in the repeated invocations of horses (being led to water, etc.), cows (coming home), swallows (one not making a summer); or in the thought of searching for a child ‘up hill and down dale’ or in declaring that some belief or assumption is ‘as old as the hills’. One need not assume that those who regularly asserted that something was ‘as plain as a pike-staff had ever seen a pedlar with his pikestaff over his shoulder; that image is at least five hundred years old. But perhaps my grandmother had, as a girl in her then remote village, seen such an itinerant.

Rural sayings are partnered by those from the Bible, by injunctions more often ethical than spiritual. This being Britain, some also recall our imperial past, the wars and the soldiers and sailors who fought them. One might call the Boer War the last pre-modern event for the adding of many such images to the national pool, though there are a few from the two world wars. When a fierce quarrel developed or ‘blew up’ in our house, we usually said as it intensified: ‘the balloon’s gone up’. Later, one might have assumed that the image was inspired by the barrage balloons over urban and industrial areas in the Second World War. Obviously it was not, since we used it in the thirties. Its origins were in the battlefield observation balloons of the First World War.

Today’s ubiquitous, unending, and overlapping forms of mass communication have produced their own kinds of pre-fabricated speech, especially in the form of ‘sound-bites’, which are meant to be briefly remembered, to stick in the mind awhile, but each of which, as is the nature of endlessly successive electronic communications in the service of persuasion, cannot last, must be if at all possible superseded. Are they, like some greedy growths that destroy all before them, going to succeed, take over from the slower but, so far, longer-lasting and hence more memorable accretions of the premodern period—until they are themselves pushed into oblivion?

Few of the more traditional phrases have come from books, but that is not surprising; most were born of oral not written use, passed from mouth to mouth. Interesting exceptions include ‘itchy palm’, which occurs in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (but did he coin it?); ‘Improve the shining hour’ is in Isaac Watts’s poem, ‘How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour’, and it, too, may be older. The first is at least four centuries, the second at least two and a half centuries, old.

How were they transmitted to early 20^th-century Hunslet? Isaac Watts’s line sounds exactly like a Methodist precept of the sort we heard every week at Sunday School; it seems likely that Watts was our direct source. How did ‘itchy palm’ move up and along after Shakespeare?

Of the many epigrams from abroad, the largest group seem to be French and most of them apparently date from the Norman Conquest and after. The bad workman blaming his tools is found in late 13^th-century French before appearing in English (‘mauves ovriers ne trovera ja bon hostill’).

Given the difficulty of communications in the early days, there are more epigrams from the USA., some going back two centuries or more, than might have been expected. Since copyright was then weak or nonexistent there was from the early 19^th century a brisk trade in both directions. The children of educated English families knew and loved some of the best novels, from New England and the Mid-West in particular. The soldiers of two world wars, films and television, greatly accelerated the process. Bill Bryson lists many unexpectedly North American imports, such as: ‘having an axe to grind’, ‘having a chip on the shoulder’, ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’ (even more surprising), ‘pulling the wool over someone’s eyes’, and ‘to whitewash’ some act. That those and many another were adopted is not surprising; they are so often lively. Two we first met, when settling in there for a year in the mid-fifties, were: ‘You’re looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today’ and ‘You hit the land like a cat out of a sack’. Splendid. I have subsequently heard them both here, but each only two or three times so far.

There are also some from China and India; both have a special intriguing niche and the suggestion of very ancient wisdom. That there should be many from India is easily explained. But the Chinese? Probably some filtered through from the Opium trade. One wonders whether the Chinese have some illicitly fathered on them, especially if they suggest oriental wisdom, felt to be very different from and deeper than English. Variants of ‘If I have two pennies I would spend one on bread and one on a rose’, usually described as an old Chinese aphorism, pop up wherever someone is arguing for the public spending of more money on the arts in Britain. More cautious writers amend that to ‘three pennies, two for bread, one for the arts’, which might be thought to appeal more to British philistinism.

From wherever they come, most epigrams are used throughout society though not evenly distributed. Still, we may be said to have here something of a common culture: as English and British, to some extent also as Europeans, or simply as human beings. These are linguistic tap-roots for us all; but, importantly, each will have its different flavour.

Characteristics

Adages and their near-relatives run in all directions. They often contradict each other and leave us free to pick which suit us, according to taste or mood. We may solemnly warn a relative who is proposing to take a job far away that: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss’, that ‘East West. Home’s best’, that ‘There’s no place like home’, and ‘absence make the heart grow fonder’. Or, quite willing to see him or her go, we may cheerfully tell him that he does well not ‘to let the grass grow/the dust gather/under his feet’, that ‘He who hesitates is lost’—but perhaps add the sombre ‘out of sight is out of mind’.

That little group illustrates, incidentally, an earlier point about the wide historical spread of current commonplaces. In dates of origin they alone reach from the Greeks and Romans, the mid-13^th and early 16^th centuries; from Propertius and Hesiod to Erasmus and Addison. ‘East West, Home’s best’ started in Germany. In these things we are all unconscious internationalists.

Many such sayings can be used on different occasions and in different contexts, and be true there, but, it follows, not be universally true or applicable. We tend to choose a relevant one and stick it on as a validation of how we feel at that moment, in that time and place. There are sayings for all seasons. They are not usually in themselves multipurpose; each normally has only one purpose at one time: reinforcement. Taken as a group, they are multiapplicable, because they can apply to quite different experiences. Many are likely to be repeated in different settings in the following chapters and should not be redundant in any of those places. The same ones will no doubt appear in discussions of work, neighbourliness, morals, poverty, and elsewhere; and sometimes contradict each other.

Their most common single characteristic is sententiousness; they sound like hall-marked truths, totally true currency, sage and safe finger-wagging; or self-satisfied and smug; sometimes would-be-wise saws with applicable modern instances. They seem as if drawn from a cistern of unassailable wisdom, and the more unassailable if they are or sound ancient. ‘It never rains but it pours’ sounds hardly worth saying and not true anyway; then one remembers Claudius speaking to Gertrude in Hamlet: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions’, which captures the memorable weight of sad experience.

They have withstood one test of time and so, often, have their like in single words. ‘I can’t abide (so-and-so or such-and-such...)’ sounds truer than ‘I can’t stand [or ‘put up with’ or ‘support’]...’. In Yorkshire, ‘thoil’ (‘thole’ even further North—and, further back, of Indian origin) sounds firmer than ‘bear’ or ‘tolerate’). Words like those may maintain their hold because they represent old-style stability, chiefly of conduct, before experience, which would otherwise always be in unhappy or unsettling flux.

Some sound banal, inexcusably incontrovertible, so that you feel like responding: ‘So what?’ But there is occasionally a semantic trick there; they may mean more than they seem to say. Someone may aver (that seems the right word here, or ‘asseverate’ might be pulled from hiding as even more suitable) that ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ Yes, it is; how unnecessarily obvious. Then listen more closely to instances...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Poverty and Its Languages
• 3 Family and Neighbourhood (I)
• 4 Family and Neighbourhood (II)
• 5 Family and Neighbourhood (III)
• 6 Work, Class, Manners
• 7 Language and Vulgarity: The Life of the Mind
• 8 Live and Let Live
• 9 Many Beliefs
• 10 A Gathering: And a Glance at Today
• Index