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Accent aigu
S. 12
Enid Blyton, who wrote dozens of adven-
ture stories about the „Famous Five“ (four
children and a dog), also wrote on moral
themes. I remember one story in which a
child had the letters P and Q pinned onto
her until she remembered to say please and
thank you. There were many books written
to bring children to a proper understanding
of their place in society and how they
should behave, and Blyton wasn’t the only
one who saw that as part of her remit.
These days, however, codes of behaviour
have become virtually unrecognisable and
rules can be broken. In Blyton’s day it was
unthinkable to talk so loudly strangers
could hear; now we shout to people across
the street. A train journey, apart from the
whistle and the drumming of wheels, was
quiet; today, children rush up and down
the aisles, teenagers scream with laughter
and business is conducted by mobile
phone: the designated „quiet” carriages are
always booked solid. One can’t complain
about everything, as life has improved in
many aspects. We no longer smoke in res-
taurants or the cinema, instead we smoke
standing in doorways, or puff long trails of
smoke from e-cigarettes as we walk. We’re
more aware of health and safety, so food
hygiene has become rigorous; but food
waste has reached mammoth proportions.
Communication across continents is cheap
but posting birthday cards is expensive.
Museums are now vibrant centres of lear-
ning and interest, but libraries are closing.
You cannot win everything, although some
gains, such as better healthcare, make up
for much else.
However, when it comes to language, the
rules really have been broken. At school,
your English lessons taught you to speak
and write grammatically, whoever you
were, and you read the works of some of
the great novelists and poets who had
contributed to our culture. We may not
have appreciated Shakespeare or Dickens,
but we were given the chance to discover
the beauty of our language and how words
can stimulate imagination and one’s own
ability to write, even if it’s only a letter. But
in the twenty-first century schools shy
away from teaching great literature; like La-
tin it’s seen as elitist, difficult and irrele-
vant: even ordinary language is being chal-
lenged. Obscenities, for example, are now
so much a part of modern speech they have
lost most of their impact to shock or ex-
press anger. The use of „like“, as in „so I
was like...“, followed by a facial expression
or gesture to replace the explanatory adjec-
tive or sentence, is common parlance for
some people, and words I’ve always consi-
dered as ordinary English aren’t any longer;
like Latin they’re perceived as elitist, such
is the poverty of today’s vocabulary. Lan-
guage, as much else, has been simplified or
dumbed down. Even colours, once so des-
criptive, have been reduced to the basic
red, blue, green and yellow. What happe-
ned to scarlet, crimson, turquoise and
French navy? Does anyone remember
what duck-egg blue looks like or bottle
green, and how about aubergine, primrose
and gunmetal grey? I mourn today’s lack of
descriptive choice, a treasure chest of lan-
guage now locked away; but even worse is
the increasing lack of grammatical accu-
racy and incorrect pronunciation. Until re-
latively recently, with the exception of
those who’d had very little education, we
would say, „I was sitting down....“. These
days, it is common for even the university
educated to say, „I was sat down.“ But this
slovenly way of speaking isn’t just because
teachers have little time to teach grammar
and cannot correct a child’s spoken mista-
kes, it’s a form of inverted snobbery which
frequently comes from those whose educa-
tion has been privileged. And when it co-
mes to mispronunciation, when did the
stress on the second syllable of „contri-
bute“ move to the first?
Language cannot remain static and tech-
nology insists we move forward so, to com-
pensate for my allegedly fossilized vocabu-
lary, I’m learning new skills, having just ac-
quired a smart phone. Texting in shorthand
for speed with symbols instead of words,
seeing my daughters as we speak, sending
them photos, checking email, finding out
information about trains, towns, or reading
the news; all this is gradually becoming fa-
miliar. Its usefulness, which I’m still disco-
vering, expands my individual world in
ways that leave me breathless with the
wonder of modern technology. The blight
of loneliness is dissipated as I have visible
contact with those I love, and their world,
so different from mine, is brought closer
and with greater understanding. And joy of
joys, my new toy has even brought me a
rare eighteenth century book to read,
downloaded for free, one I would never
have found elsewhere.
But discovering the possibilities of this
amazing world increases my regret at the
disappearance of our beautiful and varied
language. From my education and the lite-
rature I read, written by people who were
masters of their craft, a wealth of words was
and is available to me. English once used
more descriptive vocabulary than any other
language on the planet; it was such that
thoughts and feelings could be nuanced to
perfection. However, I am one of the lucky
ones; I still belong to this disappearing
world. No matter how fully I embrace the
new one, the fading world of good lan-
guage and literature remains for me to en-
joy. Those who will miss out are the rising
generation. Instead of the language of Aus-
ten and Stevenson, the poetry of Keats or
Clare, theirs will be the language of the
street. A poor substitute.
I grew up in a country where life was
composed of formalities. There was ge-
nerally only one way of doing some-
thing correctly in a social context, and
although the correct way might vary
according to where you lived and who
you were, the unwritten rules and codes
of behaviour were almost set in stone.
Authority was obeyed and adults res-
pected, even feared. Good manners
were obligatory, with children’s books
frequently emphasising their impor-
tance.
Diana White
Bad language
Letter from England