How to spell trouble in the English language

[1]

Farrukh Dhondy [1]

"The old know the secret

The young pretend,

Seeing the beginning

Is seeing the end."

From Handwriting Practice

by Bachchoo

July.04 : If I feel like what Emperor Nero must have felt when the thought of transference to a minor key obsessed his evening as Rome was aflame at his feet, it is because while the world is in turmoil my thoughts turn to the Cambridge University lexicographers’ announcement that henceforth spelling duznt Maturr.

The announcement bothers me. It is a tradition in Britain to refuse or return knighthoods and other honours that the government grants and the Queen bestows if the person being honoured wants to stage a public protest. I have myself several times contemplated the reasons I would refuse a knighthood when approached by the Queen and have diligently rehearsed my rejection speeches, quoting one or other disagreement with some policy of the running dog, capitalist governments of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The Royal establishment must have, on each of these occasions, discovered my intention and, not wanting to put the government and the monarch through the embarrassment of such a momentous rejection, withdrawn the offer at the last moment. I can reassure my Marxising and socialist friends (the few remaining ones) that I am still not "Sir" Farrukh. Not officially anyway.

I mention this method of protest against some policy of the realm because after the Cambridge language-wallahs made their little pronouncement, I wondered whether I should start a protest movement to return my Cambridge MA and get others to do the same. On enquiry I was told by the university that there was no such procedure. I couldn’t give back the degree because there would be no one there to receive it. It now appears that getting a Cambridge degree is like joining the mafia — once in, there’s no way out.

It doesn’t matter. These fellows have made very large pronouncements before. Last year they said that Indian English would become the universal or globally-dominant form of the language in a century or in four generations. In this, the Cambridge linguists have fallen into a numerical trap. It may be true that Indians speak a sort of English and that each year the call centre industry grows and the men and women who work in global infotech, increasingly recruited from the ranks of decent Kannadian (not a misspelling, I mean guys from Bengaluru and environs) youth, but as far as language is concerned, numbers alone don’t count. Remember the old anti-Jewish-fabric-seller joke: "Never mind the quality, just feel the width"? I fear we have fallen into some such fallacy here.

I won’t produce anecdotal evidence and ask if you have ever tried to talk in English to the young men and women who work the call centres or even those who work in the broad ranks of infotech. They speak a transactional English and I vouch, can’t compete with William Shakespeare’s vocabulary which is estimated (by some infotech number-cruncher, no doubt) to have consisted of 30,000 words.

The non-anecdotal test is to read the manuals of gobbledegook produced to instruct buyers on how to use a TV box top, an iPhone, a computer system or any other modern gadget. I always thought these books were written in China by prisoners undergoing re-education. But am told that they are written in most cases by Americans who work in the infotech sector. Aha! Now I know. These are either American nerds, born in test-tubes and taught to speak from childhood by robots, or they are Indian techies. Compare their works, oh reader, to, say, those of Henry James. Oh! America, America! What a falling off was there!

The point is that Indian English has to be used in all the registers of human activity and emotion to become the new global avatar of Shakespeare’s bequest. Sure we have novelists who imitate English and American writers and we have increasingly literate journalists, but these were not the men and women whose heads were being counted when Cambridge University concluded that we would all be speaking Indian versions of the Anglo-Saxon lingua franca.

That was last year. Now they contend that the rules of spelling and even of punctuation can be dispensed with. This follows the broad belief that language is "organic" and grows and changes with usage. This is a very respectable belief and it is palpably demonstrable. But to my old-fashioned mind there ought to be some resistance to the mindless changes that linguistic evolution brings about. I fear the forces of the linguistic Ahura Mazda have lost out to those of the vulgar Ahriman in the battle to restrict "hopefully" to its adverbial function. The transformation in the meaning of words like "gay" is, on the other hand, wholly welcome. Why? Because the first — using "hopefully" to mean "with any luck" — is a mistake and the second is genuine organic evolution through invention.

Now Cambridge tells us to jettison the rule which says "i before e except after c". I have always found it useful and haven’t ended up spelling "cieling" as "ceiling" — or have I? The anti-rule-wallahs contend that there are too many exceptions.

A little story and a dropped name: Nadira Naipaul, a good friend, had been going on at me to show her my family photographs, in particular my mother and father’s photos so she could see how good-looking parents can produce such an ugly son. Going through the family album I came across the printed invitation to my and my sister’s navjote (Zoroastrian thread ceremony) which my parents had sent out to family and friends. The card was a bit yellow with age and said:

"Lt. Col. and Mrs Dhondy request the pleasure of _______________s’ company at the Navjote Ceremony of their daughter Zareen…" It went on to name me and the date etc.

I showed the photographs and this little piece of memorabilia to Nadira and she spread them all in front of hubby V.S. who looked at them with, as he said, fascination. He spent some time on the invitation and said "how handsome" and then went on to point out that the apostrophe at the end of the dash was in the wrong place. It should have been before the "s". We then spent some time contriving ways in which the errant apostrophe could be judged to be in the right place. For instance, if my parents requested the pleasure of Marks and Spencers’ company, it could pass. Could it? Should one check with the Kaymbrij dIkshinerry of Grammer and punktyouayshun?

Farrukh Dhondy