Un-fashioning English

I was just reading Geoffrey Nunberg’s Blogging in the Global Lunchroom, where apart from many things he talks about the new parlance of ‘English’ that is in vogue because of activities like SMS, texting, chatting and blogging.

That informal style recalls the colloquial voice that Addison and Steele
devised when they invented the periodical essay in the early 18th century, even
if few blogs come close to that in artfulness. Then too, those essays were
written in the guise of fictive personae like Isaac Bickerstaff and Sir Roger de
Coverly, who could be the predecessors of pseudonymous bloggers like Wonkette, Atrios, or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, not to mention the mysterious conservative
blogger who goes by the name of Edward
Boyd. 3

I thought this literary analogy was rather apt. And that’s when I realized the full circle that ‘English’ has really made. I began re-tracking the origins of the English Language.

Really, the politics of the English Language, and it was politics during its foundation years, was all about making the ‘boorish, savage-like, raw, unsophisticated native dialect’ of Angle-Land come on par and compete with other more ‘cultured, historical, fashionable’ languages of the continent like Italian, Latin, Greek and French. English being a language that originated with the Anglo-Saxon tribe was really no match for the superior elite languages of the continent. This being an impediment to England’s commercial enterprise and bargaining power in matters of overseas trade and negotiations in the colonial project, in essence forced Elizabethan court poets like Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser to ‘re-fashion’ the ‘English tongue’, to create ‘courtesy or court protocol for the English Gentlemen’ based on the knights of the roundtable and a concept of ‘Englishness’ or ‘being English’ as opposed to any other ‘European’ culture.

So how did they accomplish all this? Simple. By borrowing heavily from here, there an everywhere! English and all its literary traditions, as we have come to learn and know it, was customised and created out of the scraps and remains of various European languages. Trace the etymology of any ‘English’ word and it has its origins in Latin, French, Greek or Italian.

Anyway, all their pioneering efforts paid off and this new ‘English’ served their socio-economic-political-cultural interests very well, both within England and in international affairs. The project was a great success and the repertoire of the English vocabulary continued to grow ever since.

But today, centuries after all this effort, when English rules the roost, everyone wants to strip it down to its bare minimum! No excesses, pretence and frills. The move now is back to good ole Anglo-Saxon English and not heavy Latinate prose! With the advent of genres like Technical Writing and Web Writing, where one is specifically taught, “use end not terminate; use before not precedes”, clearly marks a move back to the days before the Norman conquest! The new English—a child of the 21 century, an offspring of SMS, blogs, emails—is bare-naked! How ironic, huh?

And just like we thought Shakespearean verse was ‘queer’ and were traumatised at how John Donne could title his poem The Sunne Rising (when MS Word clearly draws an angry red squiggly under ‘sun’ spelt ‘sunne’!), our great grand children when forced to learn the canons of ‘our century’, like Harper Lee, Joyce, Maugham, Forster, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Ayn Rand, Dan Brown, Rowling, Sonya Hartnett, will think the English very ‘queer’ and would probably be better able to identity with the cryptic Anglo-Saxon dialect in Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales! Not so hard to fathom, considering I have friends who scowl when they have to scroll endlessly to read my 850-characters-long SMS, with all words spelt out and not ‘should’ as ‘shd’!