"In his masterpiece "Leaves of Grass", Walt
Whitman
says: "The English language befriends the
grand American
expression....it is brawny enough
and limber enough and full enough....it is the
medium
that shall well nigh express the inexpressible."
One wonders. One
really wonders. All the more
when one reads sentences that - really and truly -
run like this: "It had just gone 11. After scoring
some stuff at the strip mall
downtown, eating pretzels
till I was sick to my stomach, I ran into this chick,
Sue, who really cleans up nice. Sue wanted to
know if the uni `do' was on this
day month. I said I
wasn't sure; okay, I felt like an ignorant schmoozer
but I
wasn't going to beat myself up over that.
I noticed a couple of frat boys ahead
of us who were
ogling Sue and I wanted to smack them upside their
fat heads but
Sue was talking, she wanted me to
weigh in, this was some serious stuff going
down,
and before we knew it, we were out the door."
That, now, is
English. Of a sort. The kind used
by people in the vast land known to us as
the
United States of America.
Out here in India, thankfully, we still use
British
English. However, what is increasingly happening
these days is wrong
English masquerading as a
hip trend. Which is why people keep
saying 'anyways';
any schoolteacher of the old
school will tell you the word is 'anyway'.
Another
popular term one hears is 'courtesy of'.
That second word is so redundant, it
shrieks
its wrongness out loud.
Let's not confuse wrong English with slang,
with
words like wassup, dude, whatever or
chill. Let us also not confuse it with the
way
we have indigenised the English language,
moulded it to a comfortable fit
and made it
ours, so to speak. Which is how and why
we happily use `believe you
me' and `I'll
explain you'. Well, in some indefinable way,
it works.
All
across the length and breadth of this land
of ours, different brands of English
is being
spoken and spoken sans hesitation. Alongside
Hinglish, we now have
Banglish (Bengali
English), Tinglish (Tamil), Malglish (Malayalam),
and of
course, that special one-of-a-kind,
Laloo-glish, pioneered by our pioneering
railway minister. In the northeast, they speak
it differently, ditto in Mumbai.
This indigenisation
reaches its peak in `don't stare badly, Blackface',
which
the reader will realise on some pondering is
the transliteration of the famous
'buri nazar wale,
tera mooh kala'.
Popular lore has it that Salman
Rushdie opened
the floodgates to our brand of English; early
readers of the film
magazine Stardust will remember
Hinglish invented by its then editor, Shobhaa
De. Today we have writers like Vikram Chandra
who firmly believe that English is
an Indian language
and who pepper page after page with
colloquiums with nary a
glossary anywhere in
the book. That, now, is another example of
true
indigenisation.
The media continues to be a confused lot
though. Are they
following archaic colonial
traditions of language, being what they
consider
reader-friendly (talking in the reader's
supposed patois?) or is it the
aforementioned
nonsense-as-trend thing? Well, something must
explain why we read
of train passengers being
`looted' or gratitude `being paid'. Sometimes, it is
the sheer inability to get a handle on the
foreign language that is English.
`After he was
burglarised, he became a sadder and
wizened man' reads one
unfortunate report,
while another talks of being `spell-binded'.
Then
again, may be all of it is just the insidious
influence of American English. One
has to admit
this Yankee virus does a good job of mangling
the mother language;
it has no style, no class
whatsoever. So, dear reader, this is a call
to arms:
it is time to rediscover - and use -
good English. Think about it. You have
nothing to lose but your ignorance.
(Sheila Kumar is a freelance
journalist. )
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