Make Sure youse Guys Right Good!

Whitakers Almanack, 1893

Maybe it's my reawakened interest in old books that leads me to wonder about our evolving language. I've been reading lately in a textbook titled Essays & Essay-Writing, an anthology of personal essays selected from The Atlantic Monthly and authorized for use in English classes at the Grade 12 level. It was published in 1933 and my copy comes complete with names scrawled in the frontispiece and flyleaves and the scribbled notes tell me that this copy was read (or, at least, possessed) by a series of senior students at B.L.C.H.S, which may be Blaine Lake Central (?) High School.

      An essay called “The Flavor of Things” by Robert M. Gay chronicling the author's defective relationship to mathematics contains the following sentence about people who love that particular discipline:

Permutations and combinations and the doctrine of chances filled their souls with elation; they would rather wander over the area of a parallelogram than over the greenest meadow under heaven, collecting angles and sides as another would daisies and buttercups, and chasing the unknown quantity as another might a butterfly (p. 17).

One can hardly read this today without visions of quills and inkwells, oak desks and tweed-jackets-with-elbow-patches springing to mind. The written word has changed a great deal since 1933, not only in the abandonment of antiquated diction (word choice) but in the aversion to long sentences, elaborate metaphors and the eschewing of contractions, slang and colloquialisms.

    A present-day version of Gay's sentence might well read, “Some guys really dig math.”

    I worry some days about the consequences of abandoning sensory writing and enlarged vocabulary, about the increasing inability to deal with complex sentence structures. I may be considered a language Luddite for such apprehensions, reinforced, possibly, by the style in which I've chosen to write this essay. Indeed, I've been accused in the past of writing in an archaic style that makes comprehension difficult. (Someone said to me about my book, What I Meant to Say Was . . . that they enjoyed what I'd written, even though they didn't understand much of it!)

    Go back to my first paragraph for a moment. If I had asked you to point to the frontispiece or flyleaf in a book, would you have been able to do it with confidence? These terms are book jargon, of course, and you don't have to know what they mean to be a connoisseur of literature, but I've long been of the opinion that a larger vocabulary is better than a smaller one, especially if being able to understand what's going on in the world and/or participating in significant dialogue matters to you. Likewise, if you want to read past page 5 in Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's The Grand Design with some understanding, a broad—as opposed to a narrow—vocabulary is almost mandatory.

    I don't know how the students of the Thirties fared with Essays and Essay-Writing, although I have noticed that some of the easier essays—language-wise—were more marked up than the more complex ones, a pretty good indication that the teachers using the text deferred to the apparent comprehension levels of their classes.

    In these days of the diminishing use of books for learning about the world, the questions, “what are we losing?" and "what have we lost?” seem relevant to me. Are you a bibliophile like me? Do you know what a bibliophile is? Do you share my concerns about language evolution?

    If so, let me hear from you and we can start a Language Complainers' Club! Be a nice change from complaining about the Harper Conservatives.

Fish 'n Brewis 'n Vereniki

It’s the 30th Anniversary of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. 

“What’s that,” you ask? “Are you sure that’s English ə-tall?” 

Wha’ dat y’ say? Yer some crooked t’day, me by! Bin spiken yer fish ‘n brewis again, me by?

I’ve been “ta Newfland,” and can attest to the colourful nature of the dialect, but can’t half understand some of it, so the Dictionary of Newfoundland English is going into my suitcase the next time I visit.

I grew up in a place with similar characteristics. Where Newfoundland patter draws heavily on origins in the British Isles, mine is more a mixture of a Low German that was the day to day language of my people before and after immigration in the late 19th Century, the Ukrainian and Jewish neighbourhoods adjacent to them for a hundred years in Russia and the gradual incorporation of English words borrowed to cover cases unfamiliar to my people’s history. 

Take Vereniki. We pronounced it Vren’-ə-tje and grew up thinking it was ours. Turns out it’s a mispronounced варе́ники, the Ukrainian word for a stuffed dumpling. But we made it ours by varying the contents of the dumplings, smothering them in cream gravy and plums and eating them with “Mennonite Farmer Sausage.” (I was recently asked how many Mennonite farmers had to be ground up to make a tonne of sausages!)

Borscht, similarly, became our word although traceable to the Ukrainian борщ.

There was a time when Low German and English were freely mixed in speech, a practice still persisting in more conservative Mennonite villages in Canada. Not every word is easily translatable, like Daugnikjs, for instance. Made up of Dauge—to amount to something—and nikjs (nix), it had no handy English equivalent, so mothers were apt to improvise with “You little Daugnikjs!” 

But it worked the other way ‘round as well, particularly where no German equivalent of an English word was to hand: “Dau mutt here somewheres jewesz ən loophole senne!” (There’s certainly got to be a loophole here somewhere.”) 

I confess I’m often torn between the “correctness” guaranteed by preserving the language as it was and the linguist’s understanding that all aspects of language--including grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.-- are fluid, and that the way to find out how to say a thing is to listen to how people commonly say it. I still balk, however, when I hear the pronoun “I” used in the objective case, as in “John went out with Jenny and I,” or at the splitting of an infinitive, as in “To quickly escape was mandatory.” 

Likewise, mixing languages seems to me to be either snobbish or boorish, depending on whether the foreign word used is French or Low German: de rigueur is a language snob’s fashionable and Klutz a language-boors clumsy person.

One thing, though, language is endlessly interesting. My linguistics prof posed a question that still bugs me: “Can you think without words?” he asked. In other words, is conceptualization bound by language such that a person who owns only a small vocabulary can’t possibly think loftily. Or a person who doesn’t know the jargon of science can’t think scientifically. An intriguing conundrum.

We ate at Velma’s in St. John’s. It’s touted as the place to go for authentic Newfoundland fare. I passed up on the cod cheeks and opted for fish and brewis with Figgy Duff for dessert. You may protest that cod don't actually have cheeks, but then, chickens don't have balls either.

There were no Vereniki on the menu, me by.

Slip slidin' Away

Mennonite Heritage Museum

I am currently board chair of the Mennonite Heritage Museum. Occupying the historic first-campus building of Rosthern Junior College, it houses donated artefacts, photos, books, etc. reminiscent of Mennonite settlement in the valley of the two Saskatchewan Rivers.

               Museums, auto restorers, antique collectors, nostalgia magazines—seem to me—are all working toward the same goal. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to describe it. Call it conservation, preservation, call it pickling-the-past-so-it-won’t-go-bad, if you like. You can probably describe it better than I can.

               At age 69, I’m the youngest member of the board. I’m reminded of the lyrics of Paul Simon’s Slip Slidin’ Away:

God only knows, God makes his plan
The information's unavailable to the mortal man
We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away.

And then, the haunting chorus:

Slip Slidin’ away. Slip Slidin’ away

The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away.

I suppose it’s a natural consequence of living; unfortunately—as Simon says—the information’s unavailable to mortal man. This much we know: as we near our destinations, we become more “preservative” in our thinking, become more nostalgic about the myths of “good-old days,” become more burdened by the prospect that we and our lives will be unappreciated, forgotten. That what we have learned and found to be true will not be passed on to a next generation.

               So we create museums, write memoirs, collect artefacts.

               What we should have cultivated—along with the collecting of material objects as “preservative tools”—is the art of storytelling, of myth and legend building. There’s an enormous difference between looking at a Woodland Cree stone hammer lying under glass in a museum and a wrinkled elder holding it in his life-worn hands and telling its story to a rapt audience.

               Let me put it more bluntly: what are slip sliding away are not the collections of stone hammers, samovars and Roger’s Golden Syrup pails; they’ll be here long after we’re gone. What is urgent is the preservation of language itself:  

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I don’t like your girlfriend!
No way! No way!
I think you need a new one
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I could be your girlfriend
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I know that you like me
No way! No way!
I know it's not a secret
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I want to be your girlfriend

Contrasting Avril Lavigne’s I wanna be your girlfriend to Paul Simon’s Slip Slidin’ Away is by no means a fair fight. But consider this: if we lose the art of myth, legend, storytelling that bridges the past to the present and the future, will our language then be all and only about our personal appetites and desires expressed in monosyllabic utterances? Will we cease to contemplate matters beyond ourselves if we forget how conversation, storytelling and listening happen; if we no longer have the words to express much beyond hey, you, I don’t like your girlfriend?

               We are to blame in this. We’ve flooded the world with books, cartoons, games geared for pre-schoolers, then children, then adolescents, pre-teens, young adults, all appropriately scaled to “their level of understanding and interests.” What we’ve missed in this process is that our efforts have served to retard their language learning when we thought it would advance it. Watch “children’s television” for an hour or so if you don’t believe this. It’s the Sesame Street curse on the human race. We’re in danger of wiping metaphor, allegory, parable and poetic appreciation out of our cultures in just a few generations.

               And no collection of artefacts will ever make up for that unless accompanied by the storyteller who’s not afraid to turn off the TV and gather the children ‘round.

               Don’t worry if the last washboard is lost; worry that the story and the storyteller may be slip slidin’ away, gagged with the duct tape of mediocrity and material relevance.

               Have a happy day: tell your grandchild a story.