EL1102 Studying English in Context

Tutorial No. 10: Good and bad English

This tutorial has been deliberately left more open-ended to enable further discussion. If students want to bring up issues for discussion, or to clarify problems they have been facing, they can devote the whole tutorial to these if they wish.

1. What do you consider to be good or bad English? Examine the short texts below, and state if you or other people might find some parts of it objectionable. On what grounds would some people find them objectionable (eg moral/ideological, aesthetic, economy, clarity/ambiguity)? Are these grounds defensible? Suggest alternative ways of getting across the message if necessary.

A

Oh ya cunt ye! Ma heid’s fuckin nippin this mornin, ah kin fuckin tell ye. Ah make straight fir the fuckin fridge. Yes! Two boatils ay Becks. That’ll dae me. Ah down the cunts in double quick time. Ah feel better right away. Huvtae fuckin watch the time, but. (Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting 1993, p. 109)

In standard spelling: Oh you cunt you! My head’s fucking nipping this morning, I can fucking tell you. I make straight for the fucking fridge. Yes! Two bottles of Becks [a German brand of beer]. That’ll do me. I down the cunts in double quick time. I feel better right away. Have to fucking watch the time, but [= however].

GOTCHA

Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser

(Headline of The Sun, 4 Nov 1982 when the British navy sank the General Belgrano during the Falklands war.)

Your enquiry about the use of the entrance area at the library for the purpose of displaying posters and leaflets about Welfare and Supplementary Benefit rights, gives rise to the question of the provenance and authoritativeness of the material to be displayed. Posters and leaflets issued by the Central Office of Information, the Department of Health and Social Security and other authoritative bodies are usually displayed in libraries, but items of a disputatious or polemic kind, whilst not necessarily excluded, are considered individually. (Letter in response to an enquiry about putting up posters outside the library.)

LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza? She come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead;
but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat till she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [startled] Dear me!

LIZA [piling up the indictment] What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.

(Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion)

We cannot tolerate attacks on the wife of an American citizen. (The former American president George Bush’s explanation for the US invasion of Panama)

‘Well, Tim, I feel like a whipped cur ... So long as I’ve lived, Tim, I’ve tried to do the right thing.’ Pop kept repeating in a rattling voice. ‘And now what can they be sayin’ about me?’

‘Jesus God, man, there was nothin’ else you could do, was there? What the devil can you do if you haven’t any money and haven’t any job and a lot o’ doctors and undertakers and landlords come round with their bills and you with two children to support?’ (John Dos Passos, USA [1946])

KENNY (to KRISHNA): We think 2Lt Heng is interested in your girlfriend. Malcolm was there when they went to your house to tell her about your accident last week, and they probably would have made passionate love right there and then in the living room if Corporal Ong and Malcolm weren’t around.

MALCOLM: Stop putting words in my mouth! I never said such things!!

KRISHNA: Oh no. Is this true? … Lathi, Lathi. Oh dear, what am I going to do?

AH BENG: If me, ah, I sure don’t give chance. Officer so what. Where can simply take people’s girlfriend one?

MALCOLM: Maybe we are jumping to conclusions.

JOHARI: Eh, Krishna, never mind lah. Like Corporal Ong say, ‘Hokkien people say there are many fish in the pond.’

KENNY: Oh, give me a break, Johari! All you guys can do is sit around everyday and exchange your short-sighted views on army life.

JOHARI: You damn one kind. Everyday gelek here, gelek there, want people to help you make basha, help you dig trench, help you clean rifle, help you scrub your back. But when people got problem, you don’t want to help…

KRISHNA: What on earth is going on in this place? Has Lathi called me at all? …

AH BENG: Eh, don’t be like that lah. You also must understand your girlfriend. Everyday never see you, she also can get fed-up. Keeping girlfriend not easy, you know. Like people make friend rice. Must put the char siew, the onion, the egg, all mix properly. Fire cannot too hot, and must all the time fry. If not, romance sure get burnt. Chao ta.

(Michael Chiang (1994), Army Daze, pp. 76–78)

2. What are your reactions to the following?

Personally I wish someone had told me … in my youth that … language is primarily speech and only secondarily writing. I wish someone had also told me that most grammar texts are so many etiquette books, and accepted usage a dialect of middle-class residents of a capital city …

The truth is that ‘rules’ never existed, they have little to do with language. They were superimposed on organic word-wisdom by a set of largely clerical-minded inkhorns standing around with a lot of egg on their faces.

(Geoffrey Wagner, The wisdom of words (1968))

3. This module emphasised variation in the English language.

(a) What aspects of variation are deemed significant by you?

(b) It would seem commonsensical to many that divergence and variation in language are detrimental to co-operation and progress. We can think of the story of the tower of Babel in the Bible (see box below).

(i) Do you think this is in fact so?

(ii) What are the forces at work that seem to pull language apart?

The LORD came down to see the city and tower which they had built, and he said, ‘Here they are, one people with a single language, and now they have started to do this; from now on nothing they have a mind to do will be beyond their reach. Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, so that they will not understand what they say to one another.’ So the LORD dispersed them from there all over the earth and they left off building the city. That is why it is called Babel, because there the LORD made a babble of the language of the whole world. (Genesis 11.5-9a, Revised English Bible)

4. What do you see as the future of the English language? We know about the Latin language, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, splitting up into French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, etc. Is the English language (or, if you prefer, the English languages) similarly in danger of splitting up into different splinter languages?

Best wishes for your exams! See you again soon!