The Rude Story of English by Tom Howell

Author:Tom Howell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780771039874
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2013-11-05T08:00:00+00:00

4. SCENIC WALKS IN PLAGUE COUNTRY, 1348 AD

If the English language of 1348 AD were sitting here in my office, shaking a little in its chair, I would tell it two things: (1) please calm down, and (2) I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.

The Black Death currently scouring Europe will more or less see the French away from Britain. That’s the good news. It’s not because speaking French leads directly to contracting Yersinia pestis (as far as doctors know), but in a numbers game where one in three people will spit blood and croak, whoever starts off with more players wins. Just like chess. Even Deep Blue, if already two pawns down when the piece-swapping begins, is in deep you-know-what. The French failed to breed fast enough in time for the plague. Their team contained too many jocks, bosses, and generals, but too few babysitters, house-trained uncles, young lovers, and nerds.

Dear English language of 1348, let this be a lesson to you. For now, enjoy the fact that as necks and armpits swell up across that little prison of an island, there will be vacancies in the civil service, at the church pulpits too, and at all the best restaurants. English-speakers will find they can get by perfectly well without learning a foreign language.

“Hallelujah,” the English language would probably reply, in my office. “What’s the bad news?”

“You’re going to lose your nascent guidebook industry,” I would tell it. “Don’t worry. It’s only temporary. It’ll grow back, and you’ll hardly feel a thing.”

However, for the two human beings whose livelihoods depended on the public appetite for multi-day hikes, the Black Death raised a serious threat. It probably seemed okay at first, when the mortalities numbered in the mere thousands, and several pilgrimage guides needed updating. Hengest and Horsehair could hit up their old customers for a second-edition gig. After all, what is more frustrating than to obey a paragraph in a cheap guidebook that advises you to follow a side-trail down into the hamlet of Bottompiddle for a delicious lunch at the charming pub whose prices are so reasonable, only to find that the “signifier” no longer mirrors the “signified,” so to speak – the pub is shuttered, the hamlet abandoned, the trail blocked by a smoking pile of charred, disease-ridden human flesh? During the early phase of the plague, owning the latest edition of a guidebook could make the difference between a pleasurable stroll and certain death, since the illness tended to strike village by village. Contagion could wipe out a whole community on the lee-side of a hill, while a bare mile over the hill crest, another township was thriving and its tavern offering a not-to-be-missed brunch with a view of the famous local waterwheel. But somewhere between the autumn of 1348 and the summer of 1349, a tipping-point occurred, as the death toll approached fifty per cent of the country’s population. Then, if you were a sensible person living among healthy folk, not even the Catholic propaganda machine could persuade you to go for a long walk.

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