The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  The closest America has come to producing an equivalent to clerihews were the Burma-Shave signs that graced U.S. highways for half a century. Devised in 1926 by Allan Odell, son of the founder of the Burma-Shave company, these consisted of five or six signs spaced one hundred feet apart which give a witty sales jingle for Burma-Shave shaving cream. Some examples: “A peach / looks good / with lots of fuzz / but man’s no peach / and never was. / BURMA-SHAVE.” Or “Don’t take a curve / at 60 per. / We hate to lose / a customer. / BURMA-SHAVE.” Some of the best ones never made it to the roadside because they were considered too risqué for the time. For instance: “If wifie shuns / your fond embrace / don’t shoot / the iceman / feel your face.” As recently as the 1960s, there were still 7,000 sets of Burma-Shave signs along American roadsides. But the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 put an end to the erection of any new ones, and the old ones were quickly whisked away by souvenir hunters. Now they are so much a thing of the past that a publicity woman at American Safety Razor, the company that now owns the Burma-Shave name, had never even heard of them.

  We have a deep-rooted delight in the comic effect of words in English, and not just in advertising jingles but at the highest level of endeavor. As Jespersen notes: “No literature in the world abounds as English does in characters made ridiculous to the reader by the manner in which they misapply or distort ‘big’ words,”* and he cites, among others, Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop, Fielding’s Mrs. Slipslop, Dickens’s Sam Weller, and Shakespeare’s Mrs. Quickly.

  All of these were created for comic effect in plays and novels, but sometimes it comes naturally, as with that most famous of word muddlers, the Reverend William Spooner, warden of New College at Oxford University from 1903 to 1924, whose habitual transposition of sounds—metaphasis is the technical term—made him famous in his own lifetime and gave the world a word: spoonerism. A little-known fact about Spooner was that he was an albino. He was also famously boring, a shortcoming that he himself acknowledged when he wrote plaintively of his sermons in his diary: “They are so apt to be dull.” In a profile in the London Echo in 1905, the reporter noted that Spooner “has been singularly unsuccessful in making any decided impression upon his own college.” But his most outstanding characteristic was his facility for turning phrases on their heads. Among the more famous utterances invariably attributed to him are “Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?” and, to a delinquent undergraduate: “You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain.” At an optician’s he is said to have asked, “Have you a signifying glass?” and when told they did not, replied, “Oh, well, it doesn’t magnify.” But as his biographer William Hayter notes, Spooner became so well-known for these transpositions that it is sometimes impossible to know which he really said and which were devised in his name. He is known to have said “in a dark glassly” and to have announced at a wedding ceremony that a couple were now “loifully jawned,” but it is altogether possible that he actually said very few of the spoonerisms attributed to him and that the genuine utterances weren’t nearly as comical as those he was credited with, like the almost certainly apocryphal “Please sew me to another sheet. Someone is occupewing my pie.”

  What is certain is that Spooner suffered from a kind of metaphasis of thought, if not always of word. These are generally well attributed. Outside the New College chapel he rebuked a student by saying: “I thought you read the lesson badly today.”

  “But, Sir, I didn’t read the lesson,” protested the student.

  “Ah,” said Spooner, “I thought you didn’t,” and walked on.

  On another occasion he approached a fellow don and said, “Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson.”

  The man answered, “But, Warden, I am Casson.”

  To which Spooner replied, “Never mind, come all the same.”

  Another colleague once received a note from Spooner asking him to come to his office the next morning on a matter of urgency. At the bottom there was a P.S. saying that the matter had now been resolved and the colleague needn’t bother coming after all.

  Spooner well knew his reputation for bungling speech and hated it. Once when a group of drunken students called at his window for him to make a speech, he answered testily, “You don’t want to hear me make a speech. You just hope I’ll say one of those . . . ​things.”

  In addition to mangling words in amusing ways, something else we can do in English that they cannot always do in other languages is construct intentionally ambiguous sentences that can be taken in either of two ways, as in the famous, if no doubt apocryphal, notice in a restaurant saying: “Customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager.” There is a technical term for this (isn’t there always?). It’s called amphibology. An admirable example of this neglected art was Benjamin Disraeli’s airy note to an aspiring author: “Thank you so much for the book. I shall lose no time in reading it.” Samuel Johnson didn’t quite utter an amphibology, but he neared it in spirit, when he wrote to another would-be author, “Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately, the parts that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.”

  Occasionally people grow so carried away with the possibilities of wordplay that they weave it into their everyday language. The most famous example of this in America is boontling, a made-up language once spoken widely in and around Boonville, California. According to one story on how it began (and there are several to choose from) two sets of brothers, the Duffs and the Burgers, were sitting around the Anytime Saloon in Boonville one day in 1892 when they decided for reasons of amusement to devise a private language based partly on their common Scottish-Irish heritage, partly on words from the Pomo Indians living nearby, but mostly on their own gift for coming up with colorful secret words. The idea was that no one would be able to understand what they were talking about, but as far as that went the plan was a failure because soon pretty well everyone in town was talking Boontling, or harpin’ boont as they put it locally, and for at least forty years it became the common linguistic currency in the isolated town a hundred miles north of San Francisco. It became so much a part of the local culture that some people sometimes found it took them a minute or two to readjust to the English-speaking world when they ventured out of their valley. With time, the language grew to take in about 1,200 words, a good many of them salacious, as you might expect with a private language.

  Many expressions were taken from local characters. Coffee was called zeese after the initials of a camp cook named Zachariah Clifton who made coffee you could stand a spoon up in. A hardworking German named Otto inspired the term otting for diligent work. A goatee became a billy ryan. A kerosene lantern was a floyd hutsell. Pie was called charlie brown because a local of that name always ate his pie before he ate the rest of his meal. A prostitute was a madge. A doctor was a shoveltooth on account of the protruding teeth of an early GP. Other words were based on contractions—forbs for four bits, toobs for two bits, hairk for a haircut, smalch for small change. Others contained literary or biblical allusions. Thus an illegitimate child was a bulrusher. Still others were metaphorical. A heavy rain was a trashlifter and a really heavy rain was a loglifter. But many of the most memorable terms were onomatopoeic, notably one of the terms for sexual intercourse, ricky chow, said to be the noise bedsprings make when pressed into urgent service. A great many of the words had sexual provenance, such as burlapping, a euphemism for the sexual act, based on a local anecdote involving a young couple found passing an hour in that time-honored fashion on a stack of old gunny sacks at the back of the general store.

  Although some people can still speak Boontling, it is not as widely used as it once was. In much better shape is cockney rhyming slang, as spoken in the East End of London. Rhyming slang isn’t a separate language, but simply a liberal peppering of mysterious and often venerable slang words.

  Cockneys are among the most artful u
sers of English in the world. A true cockney (the word comes from Middle English cokeney, “cock’s egg,” slang for a townsperson) is said to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells—these being the famous (and famously noisy) bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church on Cheapside in the City of London. However, for a generation or so no one has been born within their sound for the elemental reason that they were destroyed by German bombs in World War II. In any case, the rise of the City of London as the capital’s financial district meant that cockneys had long since been dispersed to more outlying districts of the East End where the bells of Bow rang out exceedingly faintly, if at all.

  The East End of London has always been a melting pot, and they’ve taken terms from every wave of invaders, from French Huguenot weavers in the sixteenth century to Bangladeshis of today. Many others have come from their own eye-opening experiences overseas during the period of empire and two world wars. Shufti, for “have a look at,” and buckshee, for “something that is free,” both come from India. “Let’s have a parlyvoo” (meaning “a chat”) comes obviously from the French parlez-vous. Less obvious is the East End expression san fairy ann, meaning “don’t mention it, no problem,” which is a corruption of the French “ça ne fait rien.” The cockneys have also devised hundreds of terms of their own. “Hang about” means “wait a minute.” “Leave it out” means “stop, don’t keep on at me.” “Straight up” means “honestly, that’s the truth.” Someone who is misbehaving is “out of order” or “taking liberties.”

  But without a doubt their most singular contribution to English has been rhyming slang. No one knows when cockney rhyming slang began, but it has certainly been popular since the mid-nineteenth century. As with general slang, some of the terms exist only for a short while before dying out, while others live on for scores of years, sometimes moving out into the wider world where their low origins and true meanings are often mercifully unappreciated.

  The two most often cited examples of rhyming slang are apples and pears = stairs and trouble and strife = wife. In point of fact, you could live a lifetime on the Mile End Road and not once hear those terms. But there are scores of others that are used daily, such as “use yer loaf” (short for loaf of bread = head), “have a butcher’s” (short for butcher’s hook = look), or “how you doin’, my old china?” (short for china plate = mate). A complicating factor is that the word that rhymes is almost always dropped, and thus the etymology is obscure. Titfer means “hat”; originally it was tit-for-tat = hat. Tom means “jewelry.” It’s short for tom-foolery = jewelry. There’s a technical term for this process as well: hemiteleia.

  A further complication is that cockney pronunciation is often considerably at variance with conventional British pronunciation, as evidenced by rabbit (to chatter mindlessly) coming from rabbit and pork = talk. In the East End both pork and talk rhyme (more or less) with soak. (Something of the flavor of cockney pronunciation is found in the old supposed cockney spelling of the London district of Ealing: “E for ’eaven, A for what ’orses eat, L for where you’re going, I for me, N for what lays eggs, and G for God’s sake keep yer ears open.”)

  Sometimes these words spawn further rhymes. Bottle, for instance, has long meant “ass” (from bottle and glass = ass). But at some point that in turn spawned Aristotle, often shortened to Aris’ (as in “Oo, I just fell on my Aris’ ”) and that in turn spawned plaster (from plaster of Paris). So you have this convoluted genealogy: plaster = plaster of Paris = Aris = Aristotle = bottle = bottle and glass = ass. (I have Americanized the spelling; the last word is actually arse, pronounced “ahss” to rhyme with “glahss.”)

  Several cockney rhyming slang terms have taken residence in America. In nineteenth-century London, dukes meant “hands” (from Duke of Yorks = forks = hand), but in America it came to mean “fist,” and lives on in the expression “put up your dukes.” Bread as a slang synonym for money comes from bread and honey. To chew the fat comes from have a chat and brass tacks comes from facts. And if you’ve ever wondered why a Bronx cheer is called a raspberry, you may wish to bear in mind that a popular dessert in Britain is called a raspberry tart.

  * Quoted in Verbatim, Vol. XIV, No. 4.

  * The Growth and Structure of the English Language, page 150.

  16.

  The Future of English

  In 1787, when representatives of the new United States gathered in Philadelphia to draw up a constitution that could serve as a blueprint for the American way of life forever, it apparently did not occur to them to consider the matter of what the national language should be. Then, and for the next two centuries, it was assumed that people would speak English. But in the 1980s a growing sense of disquiet among many Americans over the seepage of Spanish, Vietnamese, and other immigrant languages into American society led some of them to begin pressing for laws making English the official language.

  According to the Census Bureau, 11 percent of people in America speak a language other than English at home. In California alone, nearly one-fifth of the people are Hispanic. In Los Angeles, the proportion of Spanish speakers is more than half. New York City has 1.5 million Hispanics and there are a million more in the surrounding area. Bergenline Avenue in New Jersey runs for ninety blocks and throughout most of its length is largely Spanish-speaking. All told, in America there are 200 Spanish-language newspapers, 200 radio stations, and 300 television stations. The television stations alone generated nearly $300 million in Spanish-language advertising in 1987.

  In many areas, English speakers are fearful of being swamped. Some even see it as a conspiracy, among them the former U.S. senator S. I. Hayakawa, who wrote in 1987 that he believes that “a very real move is afoot to split the U.S. into a bilingual and bicultural society” [Education Digest, May 1987]. Hayakawa was instrumental in founding U.S. English, a pressure group designed to promote English as the lone official language of the country. Soon the group had 350,000 members, including such distinguished “advisory supporters” as Saul Bellow, Alistair Cooke, and Norman Cousins, and was receiving annual donations of $7.5 million. By late 1988, it had managed to have English made the official language of seventeen states—among them Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nebraska, Illinois, Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and California.

  It is easy to understand the strength of feeling among many Americans on the matter. A California law requiring that bilingual education must be provided at schools where more than twenty pupils speak a language other than English sometimes led to chaos. At one Hollywood high school, on parents’ night every speech had to be translated from English into Korean, Spanish, and Armenian. As of December 1986, California was employing 3,364 state workers proficient in Spanish in order to help non-English speakers in matters concerning courts, social services, and the like. All of this, critics maintain, cossets non-English speakers and provides them with little inducement to move into the American mainstream.

  U.S. English and other such groups maintain that linguistic divisions have caused unrest in several countries, such as Canada and Belgium—though they generally fail to note that the countries where strife and violence have been most pronounced, such as Spain, are the ones where minority languages have been most strenuously suppressed. It is interesting to speculate also whether the members of U.S. English would be so enthusiastic about language regulations if they were transferred to Quebec and found their own language effectively outlawed.

  U.S. English insists that a national English-language law would apply only to government business, and that in unofficial, private, or religious contexts people could use any language they liked. Yet it was U.S. English that tried to take AT&T to court for inserting Spanish advertisements in the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. That would hardly seem to be government business. And many Hispanics feel that there would be further encroachments on their civil liberties—such as the short-lived 1985 attempt by Dade County in Florida to require that marriage ceremonies be conducted only in English. U.S. English says that it would not ban
bilingual education, but would insist that its aim be transitional rather than encouraging entrenchment.

  The most unpleasant charge is that all of this is a thinly veiled cover for racism, or at least rampant xenophobia. As an outsider, it is difficult not to conclude sometimes that there is a degree of overreaction involved. What purpose, after all, is served by making Nebraska officially English? Nor is it immediately evident how the public good would be served by overturning a New York law that at present stipulates that the details of consumer credit transactions be printed in Spanish as well as English. If U.S. English had its way, they would be printed only in English. Would such a change really encourage Hispanics to learn English or would it simply lead to their exploitation by unscrupulous lenders?

  There is little evidence to suggest that people are refusing to learn English. According to a 1985 study by the Rand Corporation, 95 percent of the children of Mexican immigrants can speak English. By the second generation more than half can speak only English. There is after all a huge inducement in terms of convenience, culture, and income to learn the prevailing language. As the Stanford University linguist Geoffrey D. Nunberg neatly put it: “The English language needs official protection about as much as the Boston Celtics need elevator shoes.”

  Perhaps a more pressing concern ought to be not with the English used by Hispanics and other ethnic groups so much as the quality of English used in America generally. A great deal of newsprint has been consumed in recent years with reports of the decline in American educational attainments, particularly with regard to reading and writing. According to U.S. News & World Report [February 18, 1985], between 1973 and 1983, the proportion of high school students scoring 600 or higher on their Scholastic Aptitude Tests dropped from 10 percent to 7 percent. Between 1967 and 1984 verbal scores on the SAT exams slumped from an average of 466 to 424, a decline of nearly 10 percent. It is perhaps little wonder. Over the same period, the proportion of high school students receiving four years of English instruction more than halved from 85 percent to 41 percent. U.S. News & World Report put the number of functionally illiterate adults in America at twenty-seven million—that is about one in every six people aged twenty-one or over. These illiterate adults account for an estimated three-quarters of the American unemployed and their numbers are growing by two million a year.