Placing words in English

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Words are like pebbles.  In thousands of years of sliding through our throats they have lost their edges, become smooth and effortless.  Now we are hardly conscious we use them; speech has become an exchange of signifiers - so easy that at times it may even seem to be a direct communication of signifieds.

This is a measure of language's success: it has lost its strangeness, it has passed from being something in itself, to being diaphanous, a means to an end.  And necessarily: everyone has experienced the horror of a familiar word - 'from', say - disintegrating into incomprehensible shards as language reverts to its primitive roots of arbitrary concatenations of sound.  But what we have gained in facility through familiarity we have lost in linguistic racination: with our anaesthesia to the grain and surface of words, we have forfeited the possibility of holding on to their Englishness.  And a land without a tongue is a people without a heart, as every invader bent on subduing utterly a conquered nation knows.

To be sure, the Englishness of the English language is problematic.  More than any other tongue, English has gladly accepted linguistic immigrants: from Latin and Anglo-Norman, from many European languages and finally from the speech of the rest of the world, its embrace of foreign cultures and ideas growing as the British Empire grew.  As a result, some words remain barely assimilated: 'gnosticism' will never be an English word, if only because it is a rare rock whose angular edges are never likely to be smoothed.  And even coinages like 'prestidigitation' - each of whose elements is English enough - will never truly be part of the language because of their factitious polysyllabicity.

This is not to doom the non Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to some kind of chauvinist limbo; many thousands of Romance words have entered the language so deeply, and taken on the native colouring so naturally, that it comes as a shock to discover that they are later invaders - just like the Normans who brought them - words like 'beef' and 'boon'.

Nonetheless it seems clear that the most English of English words do have a recognisable look and sound.  As foreigners still relatively unfamiliar with languages such as French or Italian or German, and with their inflections and orthography, we Anglophones retain a fresh ear and eye for their characteristic forms, for their Frenchness and Germanness.  If we have lost this for the English of everyday speech, where can we hope to find new English words that are paradoxically both unknown to us - and therefore uncommon - and yet which offer the quintessence of the language, the very heart of commonness?

The answer lies in words that swim quietly about in the great sea of English like coelocanths: the place-names.  In Spridlington, Bawdrip, Moze and Lulsley, we feel simultaneously the shock of the unknown and the shock of recognition; names like Wawne, Yackleton, Hodsock and Themelthorpe are clearly totally English, and miraculously we can perceive them as such; in the breathing fossils of Whaplode, Ible, Appledram and Kexbrough, the dead elements of speech come back to life, and we reclaim our linguistic roots.

(1989)

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The weekly essay

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

When I was a schoolboy, I used to dread Monday afternoons.  It was the day we wrote our English essay.  The classes you hate are often those taken by some mentally defective bully whose only pathetic pleasure is to terrorise hapless children.  In this case it must have been from some deep antipathy to the form, or else a sense of personal inadequacy with words; it certainly had nothing to do with Mr Thurlow.

Normally grown-ups tower over you at school; Sammy Thurlow appeared small even to us in our short trousers.  He looked like a tiny Amazonian Indian dressed in a characterless grey demob suit.  And there would be no need to shrink his head: it was already brown and shrivelled, as if chain-smoking had cured him from the inside out.

On the Friday before the essay, Mr Thurlow would turn to us, his rheumy  eyes avoiding our gazes as ever, and between near-fatal coughing fits give us our theme for the following Monday.  We wondered where he got them from: 'it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive'; 'ambition'; 'the pen is mightier than the sword.'  They could have been framed in Sammy's native Amazonian dialect for all the relevance they had to this twelve-year old.

I did not understand essays then.  Drawn more naturally to mathematics, I could only approach essays as problems in search of a solution.  But answers were hard to come by: was the pen mightier than the sword, or not?  The best I could hope for were a series of alternatives, each paragraph nullifying the next with its "on the one hand" or "on the other."  I was deeply envious of fellow schoolmates who were able to take the title as the starting point for some huge fantasia, a pell-mell rush of ideas and images which never seemed to bother themselves with a final destination.  I was also convinced that in some sense they were cheating.

I could have lived with the rigours of my dialectical approach had it been easy to apply.  But it was not.  Every Monday I was faced with the same blank piece of paper, as if all my previous essays had been in vain.  I was oppressed by the sense of distance to be covered, as if the sheet of paper were all uphill.  The essay's form seemed to be a Procrustean bed which stretched my limited ideas and poor creativity to breaking point.

I realise now that it was meant to.  An essay that was easy to write would have been a waste of time.  As I vaguely but correctly sensed, writing is a journey, and often through harsh terrain.  Its destination is not an answer, but a coming together and accommodation of your current ideas.  Which was why I found essay-writing so hard: I had no ideas.

Nor did writing really help me to discover any.  Ideas come only from experience, be it your own or other people's.  As the first ideas begin to germinate within you, the essay becomes not so much simpler as richer.  The act of writing is a crystallisation of ideas; like a crystal, it is formed by creating links, and by establishing a larger order.  That order, however, is only one of many.  As its name suggests, an essay is an attempt, an instance of ambition and of travelling hopefully.

(1987)

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