ENGLISH AS SHE IS WHEELSPOKE (sic)
I
had a letter recently from a Dutch listener to the BBC, referring to my weekly
record programme. “Dear Sir, I like very much your program with old bands from
the pasture. It is very hard to
become such records only in some rubbish markets, if on hand”. Imperfect English is always good for a quick giggle.
But to me these opening lines have a certain grace and sonority that
invites analysis. Some of the
errors will be familiar to anyone who has ever
groped through a sentence or two with an inventive but inexpert foreigner.
It must be twenty years ago that an elderly Swiss gentleman, whose English was a
triumph of personality over syntax informed me, with bursting confidence, that
“you cannot become whisky in Zurich because it is
too tired”. I subsequently learnt
that the
Swiss-German for “expensive” sounds
like “tired”, and “become” instead of “get” is quite understandable,
confusing “get” as in “Get a hair-cut!” with “get” as in “Get well
quick!” If we must invest even our smallest words with more than one meaning,
we can’t grumble if foreigners become them wrong.
Returning to my letter from Holland, I find “old bands from the pasture”
much more intriguing. At first glance, I took “pasture” to be a European
equivalent of the American “corn-belt” implying that the
old bands were “corny”. But
it’s clear on reflection that my correspondent, having possibly come upon the
word in a book or article, has
taken “pasture” to be the
corollary of “future”- as
indeed it would be if our precursors who moulded the language had kept their
minds on the job. English is full
of such pitfalls for anyone who thinks that he can decipher it by simple
deduction. For instance, a foreign visitor might reasonably assume that if a
vestry is a room where one puts on and takes off vestments, then a pantry is
where one does the same with pantments. It would only confuse him further to
warn him that, were he to do any such thing, the occupants of the pantry would
certainly be taken aback and might even take affront. But he could in extreme
circumstances find himself overtaken, so it seems only fair to warn him before
he lays up trouble for himself in the fut. Sorry, future. There is an
old story not entirely irrelevant to this, about a Frenchman who called
in the early hours of the morning on an English friend. The butler told him.
“Mr X is not down yet”. He
called back in an hour, only to be
told by his friend’s wife. “My husband is not up yet”.
Flinging his arms wide in exasperation, he cried “Pliss, when will he
be in ze middle?”
Which
brings us to the rubbish markets. I must say there is nothing like a good
mistranslation to cut through the euphemisms and get at the truth. In my young
days as a record collector, there used to be an activity called “junk-shopping”,
which meant riffling about among fifth-hand 78 rpm records in tatty boxes
outside junk-shops in search of rarities. There were some gifted people, rather
like water-diviners, who could sniff out and track down eight bars of Bix
Beiderbecke on a record simply labelled “Rudy Strudeldorffer and his Uptown
Society Syncopaters”. For me junk-shops were always rubbish markets, and I’m
glad that someone has had the guts to come out and say so, even
if by mistake.
Nowadays
most of our insults are monosyllabic and phonetically unimaginative – nit,
twit, git and … well, and so on.
When we go into Europe, I look forward to hordes of foreigners being let
loose, dictionaries in hand, on some of our more boring colloquialisms. How much
more resounding and formidable would be “Become stopped up, distended, crammed
with minced seasoning, rammed into a receptacle or packed with material to
restore a lifelike shape!” than the crude and unpoetic “Get stuffed!”
But it’s not only in the department of invective that the mother tongue
has got a bit furred up. There is a now familiar
traffic regulation which says “Do not enter the box unless your exit is
clear.” Now it’s Rule One in linguistics
that if you’re going to get a word wrong, you should get it splendidly and
flamboyantly wrong. I don't know
what the right word is for a yellow painted pattern on the
tarmac, but any two-year-old will tell you forcibly that it’s not a
box, that it never was a box and that, whether you lock at it sideways, upside-down, or hanging from a streetlamp, it will never
be a box. Furthermore, by
definition an exit that is not clear ceases to be an exit. The word derives from
the third person singular of the Latin verb exire and means literally
“he goes out”. But we all know that he doesn’t go out. He
sits like a stranded whale on
the intersection, decussation, web, trellis, lattice, grid,
grille, cat’s cradle or filigree (but not box) until a “malignant and filthy
baboon” (Lord Macauly about an enemy) in
dark blue saunters across to ask, with heavy sarcasm, if he can read. If
there were any justice at all, the ability to read should in fact be a cast-iron
defence. My friend Peter Clayton,
one of the most literate of men and
a non-driver to boot, swears that
he has always taken the notice to mean “Don’t go into a public lavatory if
you are constipated.” But I
wouldn’t like to try that on the beak at Marylebone.
My father once found and copied out - from an old Punch perhaps, I don’t know - some Japanese traffic regulations, translated for the benefit of English-speaking visitors. They show how even the most mundane instructions can be enriched by inspired mistranslation. “Do not pass him by or otherwise disrespect him. When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn, trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigour, express by word of mouth the warning “Hi, Hi!” … Beware the wandering horse that he shall not take fright as you pass him by. Do not explode the exhaust box at him. Go soothingly by. Give big space to the festive dog that shall sport in the roadway. Go soothingly in the greasemud as there lurks the skid-demon. Avoid the tanglement of the dog with your wheelspokes. Press the breaking of the food as you roll round the corner to save collapse and tie-up.”
If
we ever achieve world government, I should like the Japanese to be in charge of
transport and my Dutch correspondent with his rubbish markets at the Board of
Trade. Their devastating work with the dictionary would have a
healthy purgative effect on an English language that is manifestly suffering
from an obstacled passage.
Humphrey Lyttleton, Punch, August 1971
"English as she is spoke": a few links
1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke
2) http://www.zompist.com/spoke.html
3) http://www.exclassics.com/espoke/espkint.htm
4) http://everything2.com/title/english+as+she+is+spoke
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