Now! Language!
I attempt to avoid ‘sounding off’ on my pet subjects. Ha, ha, says anyone who has read any of these blogs, I expect. There is one ‘hobby horse’ I do want to ride, however, and that is about Words.
In Lockdown, the daily broadcast of the TV quiz “Pointless” has become my afternoon cuppa. I am often amused when they announce what the subject of the next round will be — often Famous People, or Words. The first of these is a category that covers so many, from Michelangelo to Michael Jackson. And the second covers most things. Of course they go on to define their round as something entirely specific.
But — without getting into quoting Sir Thomas More — “words” is, or are, universally important. And they change, or at least the way we use them does. One pattern I have seen in my lifetime is that what would have been seen as lapses in speech, lapses of education or of taste, have tended to become acceptable, in however formal a context. “Serious” newspapers, official announcements etc, use the all-purpose word ‘like’ — ‘if you feel like you might have the symptoms’ is a possible health caution today, though I just made it up. Half a century ago, ‘like’ would be regarded as a bloomer for ‘as if’ or — probably in this case — ‘as though’. The use that really gets me is ‘like’ as a substitute for nothing at all — “I feel like I’m going to have a good day” means “I feel I’m going to have a good day”.
I’d better not get started on using ‘lay’ where the speaker or writer means ‘lie’. (“Lay back and enjoy” they urge you on the Talking Pictures channel.) This confusion goes back a long way, and seems to be almost standard in America. I have just read a really excellent historical novel in which the author repeatedly does it. It’s the first of a series, so I’d better brace myself.
I can be unobservant to changes in language use. I remember my mother asking “Why did he say ‘cheers’?” “People use it for ‘thank you’” I explained. “They can’t do” she argued, “‘Cheers’ can’t mean ‘thank you’!” Well, I’m not as unobservant as that, but my wife did have to point out to me that younger people now use “So — ” for that introductory use of “Well — ” that is almost like drawing a breath. As in answering “Tell me about yourself”, say.
But of course I’m astonished by others proving unobservant in this way. Two of my Christmas presents, off my wish list, have been novels by presenters of TV quizzes that have become favourites with me. Yes, Richard Osman from “Pointless”, and Jeremy Vine from “Eggheads”. Both are accomplished novelists, but as both are over fifty I am surprised they have not noticed shifts in popular idiom in their own lifetimes. Jeremy Vine writes a young woman in 1951 asserting herself with “Listen up!” I’d believe that expression if it were showman Phineas T.Barnum, but an English person of the generation before mine would surely have used “Listen here!”
Similarly, Richard Osman writes of characters well over seventy, occupying a retirement village. And their dialogue often contains sayings that are wrong for their age group. Someone says something like — I could never find it again, in a very long novel — “The post office here is quite the walk.” Expressions like “quite the -”, as different from “quite a -”, used to be specific to humorous speech. Someone might say a child was quite the philosopher, or their dog was quite the explorer. Or sarcastic speech — “She’s quite the little angel”, say — but not, previously, simple statements such as that somewhere was quite a walk. (Perhaps they might say of reaching it in a howling wind that it was quite the Lambeth Walk!)
Anyway, the book I am reading next is from 1908. I wonder what the author would have made of how we speak a half century after her death.
