Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (10 page)

Obviously, there is a certain arbitrariness here. And here is where the Celtic influence first helps us. The transformation of Old English into Modern English was not, as we have seen, just a matter of new words. The entire grammar changed—and the sky did not fall in. Today we say that we do not “like” nouns being used as verbs: but there was a time when, surely, a lot of people didn’t “like” that people were walking around saying things like
Did you see what he’s doing
?

We can get an approximate idea of what English would have been like today if the Celts had not saddled English with their “mistakes.” English’s closest relative is Frisian, a Dutch relative today spoken by some hundreds of thousands in the Netherlands. Frisian, especially since it has lost a goodly number of Proto-Germanic suffixes, can be seen as an approximation of what English might be today if it had not met Welsh and Cornish speakers (or Vikings, but that’s the next chapter).

Do we eat apples?
in Frisian is
Ite wy appels
? (“Eat we apples?”). No meaningless
do
. If we ask some Frisians with apples in their hands with bites out of them what they’re doing, they answer,
Wy ite appels.
They do not specify for us that they are
in the process of eating the apples at this very instant
!!!! As in any normal Germanic language, they would do this only if necessary:
Wy binne oan’t iten
(“We’re on the eating”).

This business of people plugging in an oddly redundant
do
all over the place where it didn’t belong, and always sounding oddly caffeinated in describing what they were doing, even though there wasn’t even coffee, must have sounded pretty stupid, really, for a long time in England if you weren’t born to it. But it caught on, and now it’s the only English we know. What was once a mistake is now ordinary. The lesson, quite simply, is that the conception that new ways of putting things are mistakes is an illusion.

But—do people perhaps have specific reasons for thinking that there is something different about our times that made change okay then but anathema now? One senses that when many people look back, they sense that something changed around the mid-1800s. Once we’re somewhere between roughly Jane Austen and Nathaniel Hawthorne, English is supposed to stay the way it is except for new words coming in for new things and old ones dropping out as things go obsolete.

But why just then? What is it about our times that makes English inviolable, whereas in the olden days it was okay for English to morph every which way? Late in rehearsals for the musical
Call Me Madam
in 1950, the writers started to give the star, Ethel Merman, some script changes and she said, “Boys, as of right now I am Miss Birds Eye of 1950: I am frozen. Not a comma!” What is it that made English Miss Birds Eye around a hundred years before
Call Me Madam
opened? Why just then?

Some might answer that in the old old days, English was transformed by various large-scale historical developments that no language could remain unchanged under, such as the Viking and Norman invasions, the genius of Shakespeare, and the general expansion of English into a language suitable for elevated writing styles. Today, one might suppose, English sails along dominating the world, such that suffering the kinds of abbreviations and distortions it did way back when would be—now I’m guessing what the idea might be—beneath the language’s dignity? An unnecessary source of confusion that modern education can and should retard?

What that answer misses, however, is that a massive proportion of the way a language changes is a matter of chance, unconnected to words or grammar from other languages or the way the language comes out of the mouths of foreign invaders. Namely, much of what constitutes ordinary Modern English today began as random novelties that floated in, despised as mistakes by the elite.

For example, in the nineteenth century, the time about when so many seem to think English was “done,” many grammarians considered the following words and expressions extremely déclassé:
all the time
(quality folks were to say
always
),
born in
(don’t you know it’s
born at
????),
lit
(What did I tell you, darling? it’s
lighted
),
washtub
(I don’t know why people can’t say
washing tub
as they should!).
Standpoint,
to us a rather cultivated word, was spat upon for supposedly not making sense, since you’re not standing anywhere. Believe it or not, it was also considered a tad vulgar to say
Have a look at
instead of
Look at
, and to say
The first two children
instead of
The two first
!! At classier affairs one would also have been advised to avoid popping up with louche vulgarities such as
The house is being built—
until then, one said
The house is building
—and if you said
stacked
and
fixed
the way we say them instead of “stack-ed” and “fix-ed,” to many it sounded like you were
clipping the end of the word
!!

A certain crowd back then were every bit as exercised over those things as so many of us are today over
Billy and me
and singular
they
(they didn’t like these either, of course). Yet from our vantage point, these concerns look arbitrary at best and comical at worst—I myself find fusty old complaints about these words and expressions every bit as funny as the late, great television show
Arrested Development
. (
Standpoint,
according to one fellow in 1867, was just “not an English word.” Hmm.)

So I hereby make up an English sentence:

 

To people who prided themselves on their concern with “proper” English 150 years ago, that perfectly innocent sentence would have been a galumphing mess full of “mistakes.”

The lesson again: the conception of new ways of putting things as “mistakes” is an illusion. It reflects nothing but a natural human discomfort with the unfamiliar, as well as a certain degree of the herding instinct, such that “we” speak properly while “they” do not.

Right?

No?

Is it that you can’t abide the fact that so many of the “errors” in question strike you as not just new but illogical?

Well, let’s
have a look at
that. I get what you mean.
Billy and me went to the store
breaks a rule. Because it’s
I
who went to the store, as a subject,
me
is downright illogical. It should be fixed.
They
“is” plural. It means two people. If you’re going to start using it to mean one person, then where do you draw the line? Why can’t we just start using
we
to mean “you”? Or “asparagus”?

An answer to all of this is one that is not exactly tidy, but urgent nonetheless.

No language makes perfect sense.

That’s another way of saying: there is no known language that does not have wrinkles of illogicality here and there. If one is to impose an aesthetic preference upon English or any other language, it cannot be one involving perfect order and endless clean lines, because no language like that has ever been spoken, anywhere, by anyone. Rather, one must revel in disorder. Not chaos, but perhaps the contained disorder of an ideal English garden, where it is considered proper to allow certain plants to ramble here and there, certain flowers to spread, drip, dot, dapple. Call them marks of character.

Pronouns, as it happens, are one of the places where languages tend to drip a bit. Russian, for example, gets weird in the
Billy and me
zone, too. To refer to yourself and someone else, you refer to yourself as “we.” So
Me and my wife
is
My s ženoj
(“We and the wife”). (Don’t be misled by the chance similarity between English
me
and Russian
my
; Russian’s
my
means “we.”) This is no “royal”
we
—it is the only way to say it. The
we
usage crept in out of a sense that you are referring to two people of which you are one, which is the definition of
we
-ness, just as we say
Everybody can have
their
own piece of cake
because “everybody” brings to mind lots of people rather than one body. In the same way, in Russian you do not say
He and Ivan went fishing
, but
They and Ivan went fishing
. Russians do not consider
My s ženoj
a mistake: it just is. All languages leak.

In Hebrew and other languages in its Semitic family, there is something that truly makes no damned sense and you just have to deal with it. Adjectives take a feminine ending when used with feminine nouns—no surprise there. Adjectives come after the noun, and so
Mazal tov
(“good luck,” “congratulations”), but
Šana tova
(“good year,” “Happy New Year”). But for some reason, numbers above two turn it around: they take a feminine ending with masculine nouns and no ending with feminine ones. Kibbutzes are male in Hebrew, and so three kibbutzes:
kibutzim Šlo
Ša.
Bananas are women, and so three bananas is
bananot ŠaloŠ
This just is. Israelis don’t “not like” it. It’s been that way forever, it’s that way in Arabic, it’s just that way. All languages leak.

Or then there’s a language in which when, and only when, you use a verb in the third person singular you pin a
z
sound to the end of it. That is, English: the ending is written as an -
s
, but if you think about it, it’s usually pronounced as
z
:
tries
(you don’t say “trice”),
mows, kills, tars, bids, wags,
and so on. Having a conjugational ending in the present only for the third person singular is vastly rare, believe it or not (I am aware of it in no other language on earth and am not alone among linguists in that), and surely part of the reason is that it doesn’t really make sense. What’s it there for? Wouldn’t the language be more logical if there were just no endings? Notice that this is exactly where many speakers try to take English in their colloquial speech—only to be condemned as making a “grammatical error”!

Which brings us to an idea some might have that even if all languages to date leak, there isn’t anything wrong with trying to make English the first exception. We, after all, do have things like coffee and broccoli and electricity. We had the Enlightenment. Far be it from us to accept the natural as the inevitable, one might say.

But to plug up all of English’s holes, you’d have to get rid of a lot more than singular
they
,
Billy and me,
and a few other blips that happen to attract so much attention. For example, what about good old meaningless
do
? It doesn’t make a whit of sense. It contributes nothing, and just makes forming negative sentences and questions more involved than it ever was before. Obviously we’re stuck with it—no one expects us to start talking like Frisians.
Want you
to stop using meaningless
do
? It’s illogical—but we
do
not care. Nor
do
we have much time for splitting hairs over the “logic” of using the progressive marker to express an ordinary present tense that it was not originally used for. We do not, and
can
not, care.

The snippy grammar mavens of yesteryear had their “logical” reasons for “not liking” plenty of other things we now have no problem with. For example,
first two
was thought to connote the first pair of something as opposed to some other pair or trio; otherwise, it was thought that one “should” say
two first
—i.e., to simply refer to the initial two in a sequence with no comparison intended with subsequent pairs or trios. Even today we can see how that makes a kind of sense—Jane Austen used
two first
—but we also cannot help sensing it as almost elusively particular. Maybe it’d be kind of nice if we had learned to fashion that little antimacassar distinction. But unsurprisingly, we didn’t, and no one cares today. What’s the big deal about singular
they
, then?

English is shot through with things that don’t really follow.
I’m the only one, amn’t I?
Shouldn’t it be
amn’t
after all?
Aren’t,
note, is “wrong” since
are
is used with
you
,
we
, and
they
, not
I
. There’s no “I are.”
Aren’t I?
is thoroughly illogical—and yet if you decided to start saying
amn’t
all the time, you would lose most of your friends and never get promotions. Except, actually, in parts of Scotland and Ireland where people actually do say
amn’t
—in which case the rest of us think of them as “quaint” rather than correct!

When’s the last time you learned a language where the word for
you
was the same in the singular and plural
always
? (Note that I have avoided the street-corner putrescence of
all the time
!) I don’t mean ones where you can use the plural
you
in addressing one person to be polite (French
vous
, German
Sie
, etc.)—but ones where
you
really is the only pronoun available in the second person for both singular and plural?

There are, believe it or not, languages where pronouns vary only for person but not number, such that
I
and
we
are the same word,
he, she,
and
they
are the same word, and as such, singular and plural
you
are the same word. For some reason this tends to be in Indonesia and New Guinea. But for it to be this way only with the second person? Odd, and, again, illogical, inconsistent, unpretty. And as always, when people try to clean it up and make a plural
you
with words like
y’all
and
you’uns
and
y’uns
, they are patronized as “colorful.”