now i know whirr to next

I have taken the time to reflect on my earlier post on the appalling spelling and grammar of students. Of course, none of us are exempt. I have reflected (no, no-one put a gun to my head) on the awful situation of my first and to date only book, wherein the last words of the editor assigned me were along the lines of ‘now we need to talk about page 77 [can’t remember the actual page, and there is no way on earth I am going to go and look at the book now]’ and my reply, ‘no, I’m happy with that as it is’ and she ‘well, if you’re sure’… What I thought was, she was objecting to some pompous pseudo-analysis I had been attempting on that page, which of course I was determined to keep. In fact, she was objecting to my un-deliberate attempt to break the record for the most typos on the one page of a regular paperback. It is to the discredit of all concerned, but me most of all, that this actually went to press. In fact, this same page was singled out by a couple of reviewers as completely incomprehensible. Like any published author of course the horribleness of those reviews still peer over my shoulder every waking moment (yes, I have read Paul Fussell on being reviewed – and as I have already inidcated, I am aware I brought the whole thing on myself, and that’s not the point). So it’s all very well for me to rail against students who didn’t care much about their spelling or grammar or presentation when they knew their only reader was me; I have presented a page 77 to thousands of people (NB the work in question has subsequently been revised and only has two errors, one of fact and another of reason, in it). This is not meant to be some kind of public mea culpa. I just wanted to it out there to contextualise my own irritation at others’ lack of regard for research or presentation or expression. We all do it (I admit I did it a little more publicly than many, but hell, I write a lot). I actually blame English. What else could one blame? Even if you get your English perfect, as I often don’t, you’re still spending far too much time doing so. Though more or less monolingual (barely scraped by in French in HSC) nevertheless I am well aware that most languages have rules, and even if they are very difficult and strange rules, that make them read most oddly when translated into English for us to scoff at, we know that they do have rules. English’s rules are all rules made to be broken when the exception proves them. We contort ourselves trying to get our English right, or showing that we don’t care if we do or not, and in either case we still don’t understand each other. I am sure many wonderful ideas, nuances and ambiences are put forward daily in the wrangle with English, and I am sure even more misunderstandings are perpetrated at the same time. English is a language where you can say reams of nothing just by using its form with no content. I just did it, see. I mean I know (at least, I was told by the advertisements the Rosicrucians used to run in the Green Guide) that we use only 10% of our brain power, and if we’re using that 10% to run English we’re wasting a lot of space. Even if English runs on a separate system, I still think it’s too much effort. There are people all over the world who wouldn’t dream of eating off broken dishes, or walking around with their pants busted or their feet sticking out of their shoes, but they appear happy to use a language that is all of that and more. It is a whole lot of languages grafted onto each other very poorly, like bad plumbing. There are people around who try to make this a positive, like each everyday transaction is rich with meaning and a link back to Chaucer and Shakespeare (as if! And so what?). But in fact what we have are a bunch of crappy words that we don’t know how to pronounce and if they have some kind of rich crisp background to them we never reflect on this even if we know what it is. Look at the way we write English. We have an alphabet of 26 letters. One of these can only make the same sounds as one or the other of two others (yeah, C, I’m talking about you) unless it’s added to another letter at which point for no good reason it usually makes the ‘ch’ sound. Another letter has the sound of two other letters put together, and is effectively completely useless (let’s call that one ‘x’). And so on. We have a completely unreasonable alphabet, ill-suited to our language anyway, even before we consider the separate question of spelling. Now it’s true that even if we wanted to spell words phonetically we couldn’t, because we don’t have enough letters. But our spelling scheme shoehorns practically any bizarre bunch of letters together for the purposes of making a particular word, and with entirely no rationale. So here we are, speaking and writing in the most widespread and universal language in the world, and it sucks. No-one is seriously suggesting it has any inherent advantages – well, I know some have claimed that things like a range of synonyms make it more interesting, but surely this is also a good example of what makes it more difficult to understand. The argument against language reform seems to be an Anglophile distaste for the few differences between American English and Anglo-English (losing a few ‘u’s and using ‘z’s for ‘s’s) which are I believe centuries old but are of course generally regarded as some Richard Nixon anti-art economy campaign; and of course the spectre of Orwell’s newspeak, by which language reform makes it impossible for you to think radical thoughts. As if we are not already hamstrung by the language we have. I know the above is boring. I know things will never change. I also know I have shifted from my original point. But I would bound these up into one by saying once again that the language we speak is ludicrously and needlessly complicated, and it’s all very well for those who have mastered it a little better than others to tut-tut about bad grammar (I acknowledge that I am the only person here who has actually done this), but it has to be taken within the context of understanding that English is the language equivalent of Trout Mask Replica and about as daunting even for those who were brought up in it. Cross-posted with Sarsaparilla