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For years I’ve lived off the fact that many (possibly even most) Americans “jest luuuv your English Accent”---(unlike my attempt at an American accent), and because of it will often defer to me, especially in matters linguistic.
Well, after almost thirty of those years of deception and lies; living the high life of the stage Englishman; throwing my accented weight around---Oh! And before we go any further with this essay in self-deprecation, humiliation and down-right honestly, let’s get one thing straight: Whatever, else I’m about to cop a plea to, I will stoutly maintain that I do not now, nor have I ever had, an accent (lovable or not). I speak SRP, Standard Received Pronunciation, which BY DEFINITION is not an accent, so there’s no room for argument. So there!
Anyway after, as I said, almost thirty years of this flagrant one-uppity-ness, it’s time to tear the veil, to reveal that little man behind the curtain you’ve all been ignoring as you gaze in fright at his illusions, and to reveal the horrifying truth.
The truth is...
The truth is...
The truth is that we are no better at English than you are---sometimes we’re even [sob] worse.
Now I’m not really thinking of those grand HELish sweeps ... (HELish , that is, in the sense of appertaining to the History of the English Language, rather than anything more infernal) HELish sweeps of linguistic history during which, to take a couple of mild and not terribly reprehensible examples---we carelessly lost the ending “EN” from “gotten” (though, interestingly enough, not from ill-gotten presumably since throughout our history so many of our gains have fallen into that category) so that we’ve ended up merely getting “got”. Nor again as when we adopted the pretentiously latinate “autumn” in place of the more descriptive and poetical “fall”, both of which forms we had, of course, long before America was even a gleam in Vespucci’s eye. Nor yet am I thinking of the lost opportunities of, say, the thankless misery of our missing out on your most excellent catch-all of the thanks-receiving trade, “You’re welcome!”, which was most definitely post-vespuccian-gleam.
No: what makes me ashamed to be an eponymous Englishman when speaking my namesake nowadays, is that we English have lost our grammar (not to mention driving our collective Gran’ma insane as she compares the Now with that grammatical halcyon when she was a girl).
Take the BBC. Long known as Auntie, or Auntie Beeb in honour of its (or, I suppose, ‘her’) fussy fastidiousness, she (or, I suppose, ‘it’) has gone from being a bastion of high usage, to wallowing in a bastard dialect. And it’s not just on-air that their speech comes from the wrong side of the blanket, even their web site has schoolboy howlers---why I found this example just ...sitting there on one of their pages “The woman saw the female victim sat on the kerb ” or even worse "She came over and I was sat in the chair ”
Oh! Auntie Beeb! Auntie! Drag yourself out of that gutter! And do sit up straight!
Leaving our poor Auntie to her antics, even more disturbing is this from an e-mail sent by a certain school teacher in a town of my acquaintance, who for humanitarian, legal and cowardly reasons will remain anonymous “There are some girls in my half-year whom she will have a good time with”.
Aaaargh!!!
So now I find myself not at all at liberty to amuse myself by abusing Americans who say things like ‘ir-regardless’ nor even by taking a jab at that nice Mr. Jobs from Apple who, whilst doing the gentlemanly-ish thing for all of us poor suckers---I mean early adopters---who contributed to the successful launch of his iPhone by buying one during those first heady two months ... the two months that it cost a whopping $600 before it’s price was slashed by a third; when he wrote “companies that support them well, like Apple tries to do”. We all know that you shouldn’t use ‘like’ as a subordinating conjunction as Steve Jobs tried to do (and unfortunately succeeded, come to think of it); though, in spite of my new-found humility, I’ve still got a good mind to refuse his offer of a $100 coupon in partial recompense for his pricing badness till he corrects his grammatical badness...
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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