Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (11 page)

The ending -
ly
makes an adjective into an adverb, right?
Strongly
,
helpfully, badly.
Why, then, does it pop up on adjectives as well?
A portly gentleman,
my hometown Philadelphia
The City of Brotherly Love
,
an hourly massage
(I wish). It doesn’t make sense, but try to clean it up and call Philly a city of “brother-love” and one implies an entirely different affair.

Look at these words:

Notice how they share a certain element in their meanings? All of them have to do with rapid, repetitive movement, a “hummingbird” quality. That means that the -
le
ending is actually a suffix—it carries meaning.

But if so, it’s a funny kind of suffix. With other suffixes, the words they are used with can also occur by themselves.
Strongly, strong. Happiness, happy. Curiosity, curious.
But with -
le
, as often as not the original word doesn’t exist. There are
nip
,
jig, dab,
and
curd
. But
nib
hangs around only on the margins of the language: I have used it exactly once in my forty-two-year life and that was at the beginning of this sentence.
Drib
is frozen into the set expression
dribs and drabs
(one does not say,
Look, a drib!
).
Trick,
although obviously a word, is a different one from the one that formed the basis of
trickle
(which does not mean to pull the wool over someone’s eyes in twittering repetition!), and in the same way we cannot
fid
,
fond, did, gig, wig, rid, tick,
or
stip
.

That is illogical. If
wiggle
means to squirm rapidly, then why isn’t there a verb to
wig
that refers to the undulating motion of a hula dance? Why doesn’t the mighty Mississippi River
trick
majestically along? Why doesn’t
tick
mean a seductive caress? Or, why can’t we add -
le
to other words? Why are we never described as
knockling
on a door? Why don’t we say that a drummer doing a drumroll is
tappling
?

Well, we just don’t—but if you want to make English the world’s first leakless language, you’ve got your work cut out for you with what linguists call our
frequentative
suffix -
le
. Which would include imprinting upon the English-speaking world various other words, such as
sprink
and
chort
.

Billy and me,
then, is just one more place where English has a wrinkle. In English, when subject pronouns are used after
and
, they are expressed in the form otherwise used for objects, just like in Russian, when you refer to yourself and someone else as a subject,
I
is expressed in the form otherwise used for the first person plural. That’s all.

The question is, then, what makes that “error” and the others we hear about so important compared to the ones no one bats an eye about?

Wouldn’t it seem that mere accident has people writing things like
I’m correct in viewing the use of
they
in the singular as incorrect,
aren’t
I?
Or that people who “don’t like”
impact
as a verb have no problem with the fact that the word
fun
nonsensically straddles the line between noun and adjective?
A fun party, a long party
—adjectives.
The party was fun, the party was long
—adjectives. But then,
fun
can be a noun:
We had fun, I’m sick of fun
—but “we had long”??? What “part of speech” is
fun
?

It bears mentioning that clarity is not an issue with the “errors” in question. Hearing someone say
Billy and me went to the store
, no one muses, “Hark—who is the person other than Billy that he refers to? I hear no subject!” When Thackeray wrote “A person can’t help their birth,” no one stopped and wondered “But who’s the
other
person????”

The rub is purely the issue of “logic,” and the fact is that there are no languages that make perfect sense throughout. After all, a language loping along with a meaningless
do
while dressing up its present tense in progressive clothing sure doesn’t. In a perfectly logical English, you would say,
Amn’t
I the one who
have
to
sprink
the second coat of paint on?
I presume that you have no desire to say sentences like this.

 

 

The Celtic impact on English, then, shows us that truly novel things can happen to the way a language puts words together and yet its speakers will continue to understand one another, and the language can go on to be the vehicle of a great literature.

My experience suggests that at this point, many people will still have trouble shaking a sense that observing these “rules” is part of being a respectable member of society. And it is true that in the reality of the world we live in, we cannot say
Billy and me went to the store
in a formal speech without seeming crude and untutored to many audience members; nor will my arguments change the convictions of those who write house style sheets for copy editors.

I would hope, however, that we might think of these things as what they are: arbitrary fashions of formal language that we must attend to just as we dress according to the random dictates of the fashions of our moment. Remember that what is considered “proper” English varies with the times just as fashion does.

There was a time when pedants hoped that English could pattern like Latin and not end sentences with prepositions. That fashion passed.

There was a time when pedants developed a minor obsession over English’s tendency to use expressions like
have a look
and
make a choice
rather than
look
and
choose
. That fashion passed.

In our time, pedants are engaged in a quest to keep English’s pronouns in their cages instead of
me
being used as a subject after
and
and
they
being used in the singular. Whether that fashion will pass I cannot say, but we do know that it is nothing but one more fashion. Russians happen to prefer smothering their food in sour cream much more than Americans, and in Russia the space occupied in modern American culture by wine is occupied by vodka. These are cultural differences, distinctions of vogue. Similarly, Russians with their “We and the wife” do not know our
fashion
of policing pronouns to make sure they never venture beyond their original meanings. Today as in the olden days, we are dealing with vogue indeed. People in the seventies did not think sideburns, wide collars, and bell-bottoms were more “logical” than previous fashions. It was just what people were delighted by in a passing sense, then, for a while.

We are taught that these errors are a sign of some possible catastrophe if they are allowed to persist. But I’m not sure people are aware of how languages have a way of holding together. Nothing reminds me of this more than the truly screwed-up English in the funniest book ever written in human history,
The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English.
It was written in the late 1800s by a Portuguese man described by Mark Twain in the introduction to a latterly printing as an “honest and upright idiot,” who neither spoke nor even read English, and was under the impression that he could render English by just plugging English words into French sentences. The book is almost two hundred pages of the likes of this, one of my favorite bits in it, a vignette about fishing called “The fishing”:

Three

WE SPEAK A BATTERED GRAMMAR

WHAT THE VIKINGS DID TO ENGLISH

 

 

 

 

 

English, as languages go, and especially Germanic ones, is kind of easy.

Not child’s play, but it has fewer bells and whistles than German and Swedish and the rest. Foreigners are even given to saying English is “easy,” and they are on to something, to the extent that they mean that English has no lists of conjugational endings and doesn’t make some nouns masculine and others feminine.

There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there, that English is easy at first but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details of. Purportedly, then, Russian means starting out cracking your teeth on its tables of conjugations and case markers and gender marking, but after that it’s smooth sailing.

Nonsense. English really is easy(-ish) at first and hard later, while other languages like Russian are hard at first and then
just as hard later
! Show me one person who has said that learning Russian was no problem after they mastered the basics—after the basics, you just keep wondering how anybody could speak the language without blacking out. English is truly different. Why?

Not because so many immigrants have learned it, either amid the British slave trade or later in America. We must always ask: in our modern world, how would the way the language is spoken by subordinate people, usually ridiculed as “bad grammar,” make its way into how middle-class native-born people spoke, and especially how they wrote? Some words, maybe—but as always, grammar is key. There is the way the Bosnian cabdriver speaks English now—and then there is the way the people on National Public Radio talk. Just how would Zlatko the cabdriver’s locutions affect how Terry Gross expresses herself? Obviously, not at all—even if there were millions of Zlatkos.

Besides, English drifted into its streamlined state long before the colonial era, when it was still a language only occasionally written in, and spoken by only some millions of people on a single island. The reason English is easy is a story which, like the Celtic one, traditional linguists have missed most of, in favor of seeing an uncanny number of developments in the same direction as “just happening,” though they are unheard-of in any other Germanic language or, often, anywhere on earth.

Namely, the Danes and Scandinavians who invaded and settled Britain starting in the eighth century battered not only people, monasteries, and legal institutions, but the English language itself.

 

 

Before we go on, by the way, don’t worry that “Germanic” means keeping track of twelve vastly different tongues. Really, just think of it as four.

The first “language” is Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, sometimes called Mainland Scandinavian. These three are variants of the same language; their speakers can converse.

The second language is Dutch. “Dutch” for us can include Frisian, a close relative, and Afrikaans, which is Dutch after centuries of separate development in South Africa.

The third language is High German. Yiddish is an offshoot of what also became High German, and is in essence a German dialect with a lot of words from Slavic and Hebrew. Some Yiddish scholars bristle when you say that, but it’s true, with all due respect for Yiddish’s position in a culture quite separate from the Teutonic one. So you can just think, for our purposes, of “German.”

Finally, there is Icelandic. Faroese is so similar to it that you can just think of a general “Icelandic.”

That really is all you need: Volvos, Vermeers, Volkswagens, and Volcanoes.

Traditional scholarship on The History of English recognizes that the Vikings played a part in a single thing that happened to English besides words, words, words. Namely, as we have seen, Old English shed a lot of endings in its day, such that in comparison Middle English seems like one of those nearly hairless cats.

It happened on verbs as well as nouns. Where in Modern English we have
I love
,
you love, he loves, we love,
where the only ending is the third person one with its
-s
, Old English had
ic luf-ie
,
þū luf-ast, hē luf-að, wē luf-iað.
(Quick sidebar on something we’ll see a lot of in this chapter—nothing hard: in Old English spelling,
þ
was the
th
sound in
thin
, and
ð
was the
th
sound in
this
.)