‘The English Language Belongs to Us’?

Abstract

‘The English Language Belongs to Us’? Brian Cosgrove It was hardly headline-grabbing news, but some of us found a certain interest in the report, late in 2019, that the society or group dedicated to preserving the apostrophe had decided to abandon their efforts. They did so in the face of what they term ‘ignorance and laziness’, which they apparently deemed to be invincible. Predictably, one newspaper report introduced the news with a headline about what they felt obliged to call the ‘pedantic society’, though the coverage in the paper’s article was itself measured and informed. Nonetheless, anyone who ventures into such grammatical territory can expect to be labelled a pedant, or even dismissed as a crank. So it is with some trepidation that I proceed. I assume we are talking mainly about the apostrophe as used in conjunction with the letter ‘s’: for we would surely have to retain it in such abbreviations as ‘I’d’ (for ‘I would’), ‘can’t’ (for ‘cannot’) and for that matter ‘she’s’ (for ‘she is’ or ‘she has’), etc. I was a lecturer in English for many decades, and was a defender of the apostrophe + s (or vice-versa); but the group may be right to abandon its efforts to save the apostrophe as used with the letter ‘s’, since there is no real interest in reinstating it. In any case, and more importantly, on reflection it seems to me that if the apostrophe + s were to be abandoned, it would pretty certainly not give rise to any ambiguities or problems in written English, and all would be well. If however, we decide to abandon what to many may seem finicky grammatical rules, in the face of laziness or indifference, are we not in danger of setting an unwelcome precedent? Would the consequence be that we would simply shrug our shoulders when we hear (as we do daily on our own national radio station) ‘I done’, ‘He seen’, ‘She should have went’ – and other less conspicuous grammatical lapses? Many of these solecisms derive from the phone-in public, but they are also evident, to take one example, in some sports commentators, and possibly elsewhere. The signs are that such errors are on the increase, and are more acceptable than they were not many years ago. There is, unfortunately, evidence of a further catalogue of recurrent failures in basic grammar: the tendency to confuse words which Studies • volume 109 • number 433 70 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 70 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 70 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 are roughly (and only roughly) similar (‘mitigate’, ‘militate’); the inability to discriminate with any precision between words that overlap in meaning (‘avoid’, ‘prevent’); the transference of a preposition which is valid with the passive voice of the verb (‘comprised of’) to the active voice (‘comprises of’, which is clearly ungrammatical). The question of pronunciation is a whole other can of worms; and while one might be fairly confident that the BBC has pronunciation dictionaries lying around, the same might not be true of our own national broadcaster. It would be gratifying to hear Médecins sans Frontières enunciated in a way reminiscent at least of a French speaker, or the Swiss city Lausanne pronounced with the first syllable as a full and unapologetic ‘O’. Again, we seem to take our cue from the American pronunciation of lingerie (last syllable should be ‘REE’, but inAmerica it is always ‘RAY’).The unfortunate former manager of Tottenham Hotspur, Pochettino, was variously called ‘POKettino’ or ‘POTCHettino’: he is an Argentinian, so if his name is of Italian origin, then it can only be the former. Of course, if the origin of the name is Spanish then ‘POTCH’ it would have to be. Who knows? Or, alas, who cares? Yet I can recall while temporarily living in Ontario in the early seventies – the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ had taken off – hearing on Canadian television a newsreader speaking of an incident in ‘Coal-IZ-land’ in County Tyrone. I recall too my own fit of pique thereafter, and I could hardly wait to get to the telephone and relay the correct pronunciation. I mention this to indicate how...