An Uncommon Tongue

The Uses and Resources of English

Walter Nash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000365542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

First published in 1991, An Uncommon Tongue explores the theme of usage in its widest sense: usage as what we say or write; usage as a social question; usage as a literary convention; usage and creativity.

The book reflects on the practice and status of the English language in the modern world and the demands it makes on its academic disciplines. It puts forward the argument that the study of usage transcends both the 'prescriptive' and 'descriptive' and is ultimately 'constructive', displaying the resources of language and exploring their use.

1 Standards and stuff

DOI: 10.4324/9781003157861-1

It is a gaudy scrap of paper, a page torn from the monthly catalogue of a book club to which I once belonged, and from which, as I recall, I had some difficulty in escaping. I see why I have kept this memento, for what it advertises – along with a diet and exercise programme specially designed for heavy hips and thighs – is a book on English usage. I do not really care about diet, and I am resigned to the proposition that most of my body’s fat slumps irresistibly into its lower half, but I still live in hope of learning more about my native language, and do not easily resist anything that promises to increase my command of it.

My book club bargain appears to have promised to do just that. The blurb challenges potential readers to look into their hearts and discover their own inadequacies. Do you know, it demands – in bold type – when to use which or that, your and you’re, elder and eldest? Or even – it continues, just in case we were lucky enough to clear these preliminary hurdles – when to use the Present Perfect Continuous? Here people who have been using the Present Perfect Continuous all their lives without thinking too much about it may perhaps wonder if they have been doing the right thing. But the advertisement speaks reassuringly. Well, don’t panic! it cries, in italics. This splendid book will help. It is a simple and practical guide to improving your written and spoken English. Then the copywriter, faced with the challenge of describing marvels, delineates them in italics and bold print together. It appears that the book is furnished with hundreds of exercises, covering everything from the Indefinite Article to Adjectives, Prepositions and Reported or Indirect Speech. Perhaps I am professionally jealous, but it seems to me that this grand offer amounts to rather little; to boast of ‘covering everything from the Indefinite Article to Prepositions’ is like shouting your intention to run the gamut of complexities from A to B.

That, however, is not my first and last objection to this puff for proper English. What raises my hackles is the cool commercial playing on the fears and faltering confidence of people who are bullied into thinking that their mother-tongue is their worst enemy, keeping them out of tea-rooms, boardrooms and the better sort of bedrooms, leaving them tongue-tied and manacled among the masses who will never achieve success. There is a kind of blackmail in this, all the more objectionable for being practised by someone who, on this showing, would hardly know the Present Perfect Continuous from a penny whistle. But what visions of insupportable anxiety it raises! I imagine the restless nights, the hot, moist pillows, the recurrent chagrin of worthily ambitious folk held down, as they see it, by their ignorance of Reported or Indirect Speech, their painful inability to sort out ‘elder’ from ‘eldest’. ‘Don’t you worry, old chap’, I want to tell them, ‘never you mind, my dear, it’s your language, you have a right to it, go ahead and use it and see how you get on. It’s a bit like riding a bicycle, really. You only wobble when you worry about the theory of it’. I would perhaps not be wholly prudent in saying that, because I cannot believe that go-as-you-please and free-for-all work any better in language than they do in other forms of social activity; but I would a thousand times rather that people should discover things for themselves than that they should be obliged to suffer the apprehension and guilt of being shut out from ineffable secrets which only the chosen may disclose and share.

Let us agree that people in an English-speaking country need to know English. So much is self-evident – until we venture to ask what is meant by ‘know’. The question raises the possibilities of at least three kinds of ‘knowing’. In one very important sense, ‘knowing’ the language means having access to a primary source of power. The language we ‘know’, for the purposes of administrative convenience and social recognition, is a preferred dialect, variously enjoined upon us by hostesses, copy editors and the chairfolk of interviewing boards. It is a form of etiquette and safe conduct, and in certain situations becomes an instrument of social judgement. We may be allowed to make fun of it, but we neglect it at our peril. Candidates for positions of responsibility with suitable emoluments, applicants for membership of the most desirable clubs, aspirants to literary and academic honours, even politicians, do not say ‘me and the wife’, or ‘we was’, and they do not call two glasses of sherry ‘a couple of bevvies’. Nor, for that matter, do they refer to ‘my good lady and self. They say ‘my wife and I’, and ‘we were’ and ‘cocktails’, not because such expressions are more lucid and forcible but because, as we all know, this is the way to get on in the world.

A second kind of knowing is knowing about: knowing about the structure of the language, about the forms it takes in speech or on the page, and consequently being able to talk about these forms. It is the metalanguage – the language in which we talk about language – that requires terms like Present Perfect Continuous, and it is with the suitability and consistent use of the metalanguage that many academic discussions are concerned, to the puzzlement and frequent exasperation of laypersons. Scholars, like other people, are wedded to their own customs. It happens that in describing constructions of the type ‘We have been discussing the new proposals’, I would not use the term Present Perfect Continuous, but would prefer Present Perfective Progressive. I have my reasons for this, notably a need, as I see it, to distinguish terminologically between tense, the reference to a point in time, and aspect, the way in which the action of the verb is interpreted with respect to time. In ‘I kissed the redhead’, ‘kissed’ is in the past tense; in ‘I was kissing the redhead when this guy with the tattooed nose came into the bar’, the construction ‘was kissing’ expresses an aspect of the action, called the progressive, as well as the time (past) of the event, and is accordingly labelled Past Progressive. In ‘I had been thinking about kissing the redhead when this guy with the tattooed nose began behaving unsociably, like he had been reading my thoughts or something’, ‘had been thinking’ and ‘had been reading’ express not only ‘pastness’ but also two kinds of aspect, the progressive and the perfective (meaning the aspect of an action completed over a stretch of time, or within a ‘time zone’); they are therefore described as examples of the Past Perfective Progressive. The English constructions traditionally labelled ‘Perfect’ and ‘Pluperfect’, following the descriptive practice of Latin grammar, are not primarily expressive of tense; their function is rather to convey aspect, for which reason it is preferable to refer to them as ‘Perfective’.¹ ‘So what?’ cries the average layperson, as well he or she might. The metalanguage is the grammarian’s business, and expresses the grammarian’s view of linguistic structure. Its only value for the laity must lie in its potential expediency in clarifying matters of usage. To ask a non-grammarian the question ‘Do you know when to use the Present Perfect Continuous (or Present Perfective Progressive)?’ is therefore to raise a pseudo-problem. It suggests that ordinary people of sound mind and sturdy mother-wit choose their constructions as they might choose neckties or petticoats, to fit the mood of some social occasion. It further suggests that these same people do not share the beatitude of Molière’s comic hero, Monsieur Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. You do not have to know when to say ‘I have been writing some letters’, as opposed to ‘I have written some letters’ or ‘I wrote some letters’. You have been making the right choice at the right moment for most of your life. Knowing why is perhaps a different matter; but that, too, can be left to the grammarian, until the knowledge is required to sort out a practical problem.

For it is certainly the need for knowledge of a pragmatic kind, alias skill, in the vulgar tongue called ‘know-how’, that sends the Ordinary User (somehow that category calls for capitals) on what is too often an unavailing search for bibliographical guidance. The relevant questions are not ‘Do you know when to use which or that, your and you’re, elder and eldest?’; but rather, ‘Do you know how to write a letter? Make a speech? Frame an argument? Deliver a reproof? Rebut an accusation? Make a polite enquiry? Express condolences? Tell a benevolent lie? Soften a hurtful truth? Say a great deal without revealing anything much? Say the very little that says it all?’ In short – ‘Do you know how to make your native language reflect your thinking and feeling, conduct your interactions, define your social position, negotiate your difficulties and ambitions, day in, day out, as life goes by?’ Books do not answer these questions, the replies to which, could they be set down and brought together in a single volume, would amount to a schooling in the most valuable knowledge: the knowledge of how to use language creatively, in its diverse functions.

Now we have proposed three ways of ‘knowing’ English: a knowledge of the power dialect, a knowledge of linguistic structures and descriptions, and a knowledge of language in creative action. The last of these is undoubtedly of the most general interest, and the second presents sharp challenges to minds that love the rigours of analysis and codification, but it is always the first that draws public attention, always this to which we refer when we speak of a Standard. Yet here we catch a glimpse of a notoriously elusive term. What does it mean, this ‘Standard’? In my copy of the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Standard English is defined as ‘that form of the English language which is spoken (with modifications) by the generality of cultured people in Great Britain’.² The definition begs the question of what ‘cultured’ means, and is in addition blatantly insular; ‘Standard English’ is a term not unknown to Americans, Australians and others who in using it care little enough about what goes on in Great Britain. Nevertheless, this dictionary definition manages to convey an essential feature of Standard, wherever the term is used: the notion of status.

That notion is present in some of the names that have been given during the present century to socially approved forms of British English: for example, ‘Oxford English’ and ‘BBC English’, names now somewhat out of date since the Oxford drawl came to a glottal stop, the ‘wireless’ gave place to radio and TV, and pomaded gentlemen in Portland Place were no longer obliged to don evening dress to read the news.³ Labels like ‘Oxford English’ denoted a style of pronunciation, regarded with a mixture of envy and resentment by those who had not acquired it. You will doubtless remember D.H. Lawrence’s poem on ‘The Oxford Voice’:

When you hear it languishing

and hooing and cooing and sidling through the front teeth

the Oxford voice

or worse still

the would-be Oxford voice

you don’t even laugh any more, you can’t

For every blooming bird is an Oxford cuckoo nowadays.

You can’t sit on the bus or in the tube

but it breathes gently and languishingly in the back of your neck.

That typical piece of Lawrentian spleen is a response to a way of speech but not to a way of vocabulary or grammar. Lawrence may have detested Oxford English, but as a writer he sedulously observed the conventions, in lexicon and syntax, of Standard English – or, as he might very well have put it, the King’s English.⁴

We still occasionally hear that expression, though you might have thought it would have died out by now; after all, a Queen has been reigning over us for the best part of forty years. If the phrase lives on, it is almost certainly because it is the title of a very well known book by H.W. and F.G. Fowler. It is worth reminding ourselves of the date of publication of this classic: 1906, three years after the accession of King Edward VII. The title thus adroitly served three purposes. It announced a book on the very latest condition of the English language; it recalled a centuries-old phrase, with its intimations of authority and prestige; and it made a patriotic obeisance in the direction of Buckingham Palace.⁵ The Fowlers were, in their chosen field, men of great and lasting achievement. You can hardly discuss usage without mentioning the name Fowler. They were also, it has to be said, middle-class mandarins, whose examples of ‘correct’ usage often bear the credentials of a peculiar loftiness. Here they are, for example, illustrating the difference between ‘one’ used as a so-called ‘indefinite pronoun’ (as in ‘One does one’s job as well as one can’) and as a ‘numeral pronoun’ (in, for instance, ‘One [of them] did his job badly’). The Fowlers exemplify in a way that suggests the best people seen in the best settings – strolling, it may be, through the park:

One does not forget one’s own name: I saw one of them drop his her muff, its leaves.⁶

There is nothing at all wrong with this, except its comic conveyance of the notion that the Fowlers were writing for persons of the cigar-smoking, muff-carrying, promenading class, an impression not dispelled anywhere else in the book by exemplary reference to somewhat humbler personnel. These authors, indeed, refer explicitly and flatteringly to ‘the ordinary man, of average intelligence and middle-class position’, and rather less flatteringly to ‘the masses’ and ‘the vast number of people who are incapable of appreciating finer shades of meaning’.⁷ This arrogance would be insufferable if it were not just a little comic. Had the Fowlers bothered to take an attentive walk through a street market they might have learned something about finer shades of meaning among the masses, though they may not have seen anyone drop his cigar or her muff.

But the Fowlers evidently thought of themselves as representing Standard, or ‘correct’ English, the usage of the well-educated and the well-bred. Their views on language are in no way different from those concisely expressed nearly a century and a half earlier by Lord Chesterfield:

The common people of every country speak their own language very ill; the people of fashion (as they are called) speak it better, but not always correctly, because they are not always people of letters. Those who speak their own language the most accurately are those who have learning and are at the same time in the polite world; at least their language will be reckoned the standard of the language of that country.⁸

This, incidentally, is an early occurrence of the term ‘standard’ in reference to language. Chesterfield’s observation is most memorable, however, for its presentation of Standard as a practice with two complementary elements, the social and the literary.⁹

The idea of Standard is substantially based in the idea of social class; and the class-base is in its turn related to political and economic ideas which we can trace back to the Middle Ages. Here, for example, is a comment on the English language made in the fourteenth century by a West Countryman, John Trevisa:

All the speech of the northerners, particularly at York, is so abrupt, piercing, harsh and outlandish, that we southerners can barely understand it. I believe this to be because they live near to strangers and foreigners with alien speech, and because the kings of England always live far away from that region…. The reason why they keep to the south rather than the north may be that the south has better arable land, more people, finer cities, and more profitable ports.¹⁰

Although this passage, well known to historians of the mother-tongue, does not explicitly use the phrase ‘the King’s English’, it strongly implies the concept. It is striking, furthermore, as a piece of sociolinguistic explanation. The standard is where the king is; but the king is where he is for mainly economic reasons. Urban life, commerce and a high density of population, all have their influence on the location of the court, and the court has its influence on the shaping of a standard language. Trevisa’s analysis is only one instance (though possibly the earliest in English) of a historic connection between socio-economic power and the evolution of Standard. Later ages tell their stories of power-shift and social change, with an implied redefinition of the governors of the language. H.C. Wyld writes excellently on this theme, alluding to ‘the social, political, and economic events in our history which have resulted in bringing different classes of the population into positions of prominence and power in the State, and the consequent reduction in the influence of the older governing classes’:

Among these events … are the break...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyrigh page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Standards and stuff
• 2 Usage, users and the used
• 3 The difficulty of explaining: a word or two about dictionaries
• 4 Our true intent: or, what’s the point of punctuation?
• 5 The possibilities of paraphrase
• 6 On parody: a discourse with interludes
• 7 The meanings of metadiscourse
• 8 On writing well
• 9 Composition and creativeness
• 10 Historic event, creative effort: the making of a dramatic poem
• 11 English: a global resource?
• Appendix A Extracts from dictionaries, in connection with chapter 3, ‘The difficulty of explaining’.
• Appendix B Extracts from The Times, 9-23 April 1803, in connection with chapter 10, ‘Historic event, creative effort’.
• Notes
• Index