If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection.
If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection. It’s as if you can get rusty with audacious speed, and that without continual usage the habit of conversation begins to degenerate, like the muscles of a marathon runner who stops running. Radio, though, is a good way of pretending; of imagining yourself in a conversation even if there is no one else in the house. A couple of programmes on Radio Four this week talked about language, how we speak, how we make connections through what we say, and why words, or rather the right words, matter. It was impossible not to answer back.
In Winter Storm, an atmospheric afternoon play by the award-winning short-story writer Bernard MacLaverty (produced by Kirsteen Cameron), the right words came as a bit of a surprise. Andrew, played by the inimitable John Gregory’s Girl Gordon Sinclair, is a poet marooned on a university campus in Iowa on a year-long residency. He’s a bit of a loser relationship-wise, but not half bad with words. While the wind whistles across the prairies beyond his window, he’s got nothing else to do but chase down the perfect poem.
Poetry, he decides, is all about seeing the world around you and then reporting back ‘in the best words’. Yet he can’t stop the words of Wittgenstein he learnt as a student echoing through his mind, ‘It’s hard to say anything that’s as good as saying nothing.’ Is it the sound of words that matters, he asks himself, or the meaning? What in any case are the best words, and how can he, miserable, self-obsessed and lonely as he is, hope to find them?
While the words drain ceaselessly out of him and on to his computer screen, the office cleaner, who seems to be the only other person on campus on this dreary, storm-bound day, has few words at her disposal beyond ‘You betcha’. Yet when Andrew loses his way in the threatening blizzard that obscures his path home, the sound of ‘You betcha’ has a resonance, a meaning and a purpose far more powerful than any of his own highfalutin constructions. You betcha.
Also on Tuesday, Benjamin Zephaniah, the self-professed ‘dub’ poet brought up in a Birmingham suburb but proud of his Caribbean roots, explored the explosion of slang usage among young people. Is it OK to speak a language that is mostly peppered with phrases like ‘Init?’, ‘Duh yuh kno wot I mean?’ and ‘Yeah, right, bruv, init and stuff’? Or should schools ban slang from the corridors and playground as well as from the classroom?
In Mind Your Slanguage (produced by Barney Rowntree and Joby Waldman) Zephaniah visited the Manchester Academy, a business and enterprise school, where since 2007 the pupils have been penalised for using slang in an attempt to improve their exam grades. The experiment has worked, although as one teenager suggested, somewhat cheekily, slang can be more effective as a means of making yourself understood. He had spent ten minutes trying to get the maths teacher’s attention with a polite, ‘Please, Miss, can I ask a question?’ But to no avail. It was only when he said, ‘Yo, Miss’ that he got a response.
Zephaniah also talked with linguists such as Tony Thorne of King’s College, London who specialises in ‘language innovation’. Dr Thorne believes slang is a sophisticated form of language, even when it appears crude and deviant (those hoodies on the bus, or Tube, who dominate with their shared but secret language). It’s all about ‘appropriacy’ — knowing, for instance, when not to say, ‘Yeah, right, I just wanna work ’ere, init’ in the middle of a job interview.
We all use slang, anyway, creating a language that fits the workplace, the family, the gang of friends. It’s why English is such a rich language; if in doubt about the right word, invent one. As Dr Johnson discovered when he worked on his Dictionary in the 1750s, it’s not possible, as he had once hoped, to delete ‘the corruptions of ignorance’ and ‘caprices of innovation’ which colour the language. His attempt to harness the meaning of words in common usage had led him to realise that language cannot be ‘fixed’. ‘Pronunciation will be varied by levity or ignorance, and the pen must at length comply with the tongue.’ He had seen that even in the nine years it had taken him to complete the Dictionary ‘some words are budding and some falling away’.
Such vitality enhances communication — as long as we all keep up. Just don’t fall into the trap of trying to fit in with teenagers by aping their lingo. It’s like ‘seeing your uncle [or aunt] dancing — it’s very upsetting’. Yo, right.
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