The Patient Has the Floor: Essays by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke [Cooke, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, essays, Speeches, history, United States, General
ISBN: 9781497639942
Google: 3jYaBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-08-19T23:49:29.603812+00:00

* Majno, G. The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1975.

9

The State of the Language

Given before an English Speaking Union

conference of British and American scholars in San Francisco,

1 November 1979

9

The State of the Language

I apologize for taking out a script. I am in the habit, myself—especially after dinner—of speaking off the cuff or the top of the head, according to which is more available at the time. But this is an occasion with a special hazard. I am facing a pack of linguistic watchdogs who, like the people who review anthologies, are not going to be impressed by a wealth of accurate knowledge (even if I had it) so much as by small omissions and single slips.

As when J.B. Sykes put out, after seven years of lonely labour, his monumental new Concise Oxford Dictionary (a small monument but an exquisite one) one London reviewer spent little time applauding the thousands of definitions that are miracles of clarity and exactness. He took up most of his column protesting the secondary definition given to a simple four-letter word that, Sykes said, was a slang term of abuse applied usually to a woman. Not so, said the reviewer, and he went on and on about Sykes’s insensitivity to pejorative usage in general and this cutting example in particular. I blush, even in this year of liberation, to pronounce the word. I leave you to rush home, get out your Sykes, and—beginning with the letter A—keep going till you find it.

I am told that the coming seminars will be addressed by experts in Legal English and Black English, in everything from the new Episcopalian liturgy to the new liturgy of copulation. I am honoured to be invited to kick off this series of matches between the structuralists and the semanticists and the other fashionable combatants. Fifty years ago, I might have had something special to offer, for it was a time when I sat at the feet of Dr Richards trying to fathom the Meaning of Meaning, and when his most precocious pupil, William Empson, was warning us that nothing is as simple as it seems or sounds. But I have strayed very far from those battles long ago, and my effort this evening is so humble that it may affront many people here. It has to do with the state of the language as it is being used in the day-to-day intercourse of people: of politicians and voters, of advertisers and consumers, of businessmen and customers, of broadcasters and their listeners, of you and me going about the ordinary business of life.

A generation ago, I should have said that I was making a plea to everyone who works with children to see that they get a grounding in English grammar and English idiom, and pay particular attention to such things as the great range of connectives, like ‘on the whole’ and ‘yet’ and ‘for that matter’; and seeing that they become familiar with the wonderful

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