Word of honour

I PROMISE to return to local politics in my next column but there is something else I want to get off my chest today.

You know you’re getting old when you start getting all grumpy about the way the English language is changing. We all know that any living language has to evolve, and no one wants to speak like a character out of the Canterbury Tales, but steady on now.

I well remember how the way my friends and I spoke as youngsters sometimes annoyed our more crusty elders but back then we never thought we could ever become so linguistically conservative ourselves. Then suddenly one day, out of a clear blue sky, I find myself pointlessly telling off people on my radio or my television for ‘saying it all wrong’.

I’m not just talking about the increasingly American pronunciation of the English language. Privacy, schedule, lieutenant and so on. Rather, it is all of those new words and phrases pushing out the ones we have been familiar with all of our lives. Then there is the use of vernacular expressions, which we may well have always used to our friends and neighbours over the garden hedge, suddenly and incongruously appearing in official communications.

For example, I am delighted that the vaccination programme against Covid-19 is now in full swing. I can hardly wait for my turn to get this crucial protection against the pandemic. But when I arrive at Beau Sejour I will definitely be expecting to receive an ‘injection’ not a ‘jab’.

When will that be? I don’t know but I am convinced that my appointment is ‘forthcoming’, or coming towards me, rather than ‘upcoming’, which presumably means it’s currently somewhere beneath my feet.

Why am I sudden so vinegary about modern idioms? I don’t know. It could be that I can’t shake off my rigid BBC training. For example, it was drilled into us that you never referred simply to a ‘post-mortem’ but instead had to talk about a ‘post-mortem examination’. After all, what on Earth was an ‘after death’ meant to mean?

Equally heinous crimes included using ‘less’ when it should be ‘fewer’ or suggesting a murderer had been ‘hung’. Only pictures are hung – people are hanged. Talking of which, using the new-fangled plural ‘referenda’ instead of the traditional ‘referendums’ (nasty things anyway) was probably a hanging offence.

And don’t get me on to the pronunciation unit at the BBC. At first they gave me real grief about my Guernseyisms – such as pronouncing a U just like an O. Admittedly there was no difference between my pronunciation of flowers or young dogs – they both came out as poppies. This was seemingly a heinous crime, until I said, ‘but everybody in Guernsey pronounces their U’s like that’. At which point there was a sharp intake of breath and a complete change of attitude.

BBC: ‘So your odd pronunciations are actually a regional accent.’

Me: ‘Yes, of course they are.’

BBC: ‘Great, we really welcome diversity and regional accents here.’

Problem over.

So I could then get away with saying things a bit oddly, but I still wasn’t allowed to vary from some fairly strict rules on the selection of words or the construction of sentences. For example, I love split infinitives but my employer definitely didn’t. Had I insisted on using them, I suspect I would have been told ‘to boldly go and work somewhere else’.

However, it is now years since I left the Beeb and over that time I have generally become far more casual in the use of my mother tongue, so I don’t really think I can blame our public service broadcaster for my sudden linguistic intolerance.

Indeed, these days they are more likely to be the biggest culprit rather than the policeman. If I have to listen to another news bulletin which claims that above-inflation pay rises are ‘inflation busting’, or that people who have won prizes have ‘scooped’ them, I shall scream.

Of course, over the last few months a lot of our broadcast news coverage has been coming from stateside and that has given us fair warning of the next set of linguistic monstrosities heading our way from across the pond.

When the world went into the pandemic, we were all hoping earnestly for a return to ‘normality’, but by the time we come out of the crisis the best we will probably be able to hope for is ‘normalcy’. Whatever that may be.

What else will the future hold? Who knows? I have spent my life trying to ‘visualise’ things, but now it seems I have to try to ‘envision’ them instead. It is not natural and no good will come of it.

So if I can’t blame the BBC for my crustiness, what should I put it down to? I think my rather pathetic, new-found intolerance of linguistic evolution is probably far more to do with my new year’s resolution to stay off the booze than anything else.

As soon as I have had my first glass of red wine of 2021, all of this angst about ‘how people say stuff these days’ will fall away. Suddenly it will matter not a jot how people express themselves – just so long as their meaning is clear.

After my second glass, absolutely anything will go. Except of course people putting the word ‘so’ at the beginning of replies to questions for no apparent reason. Some things genuinely are beyond the pale.