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[ 20-02-2005 ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/macfarlane.html
'Sheddeen' tears for the language
By ANDY MACFARLANE - For the London Free Press
October 13, 2001
I once phoned a friend to check a date and was delighted when his department chairperson at UWO answered, in stentorian academic tones: "History speaking." Wow, what a metaphor! I thought. For did not the university speak indeed with the voice of our cultural/historical totality? (I was young and impressionable at the time.)
I am sorry to report History is no longer answering the phone at Western, but rather a pair of perfectly nice, I am sure, computer-generated Maxine Headrooms, one, politely disinterested, who invites me to "access the name dialing directory" by pressing 4, and the other, sincere as warm orange Crush, who tells me to spell the name of the person I'm calling, using 7 for q and 9 for zee. Nine for what? Zee? Zee? Zee! Good Lord is there nothing sacred?
Why would a university - a university! - bow to the endless assault on Canadian usage? Proe-doose took over the supermarkets without a shot, although Her Excellency, Ms.Weston, could have exerted some influence in that sector. Pree-loods found their way into CBC music programs. Ontario cops blossomed out in California Highway Patrol headgear. But a university collaborating with the linguistic Fenians! It is to weep.
All right, all right. Of course we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our American friends in the present crisis, but not tonsil-to-tonsil. Surely we don't have to give up our speech patterns in all of this, eh.
Anyway, criticizing the public speech of blameless others is actually a non-political vice, an addiction to which I am a willing slave, and not the only one.
Clifton Fadiman, Book-of-the-Month founder and a great, middlebrow American man of letters, who recently died at 95, was a compulsive editor/proofreader. He would give people back their copies of novels with the mistakes neatly edited in ink. He handed maitre d's corrected menus on his way out of restaurants.
Undaunted when he became blind, he turned proof-listener, keeping meticulous records of barbarities and solecisms and gaucheries heard in days of assiduous dial twisting.
Under the latter heading, I cherish Champs Elysees said as though it were a sports bar, which I actually heard on TV in another city in a galaxy far away, as I did other examples hereunder, such as the newscaster a few years back who referred every night to the Golf War, which made it a little less horrendous.
Am I the only one to notice there are no more problems in the world, just "issues?" My dear old mother and all the other parents had issues with the lazy mispronouncing of "ing," and if you said, "Comin'" when called, you might have rap-across-the-ear issues. "You sound like someone from the Ward," they would say, where lived Torontonians thought to lack the opportunities for education and refinement.
Some kids would ratchet up one notch from "comin'" to "comeen," but they were vigorously encouraged to grow out of it. So when I now hear network sports guys discusseen winneen and loseen teams, I shout, "ing! ing, dammit!" which confirms my wife's suspicion of sanity issues. If they'd say "ing," I'd be danceen in the streets - a Highland fleen!
One of the great broadcasting inventions, not here I re-emphasize, is Emphatic Meaninglessness. If you pop the prepositions and come down hard on 'and' and the verb to be, in a piece of copy, you can sound authoritative without having to worry about what you're saying: "The man WAS spotted climbing OVER the fence AND across the field where there IS a wooded area . . . "
This is actually a variant on Greyhound bus-terminal announcing, as in: "Greyhound service FOR Hamilton WILL depart FROM the Elizabeth-Street terminal and tickets FOR this service must be purchased IN the Elizabeth Street terminal," where I think it IS more appropriate than IN news AND its reporting.
Some eccentricities are contributions to, rather than attritions of, local culture. Just as people in the Ottawa Valley say Hahrold and cahrrot, Londoners quite properly mispronounce Tawlbot, use Ave as a word, and shift the accent one syllable to the right of where it should be in the name of the respected local shoe retailer as, FodeMEEsi.
We emphasize the 'yer' in fire and sometimes the 'it' in Detroit, and we know that Aylmer is pronounced "Elmer" and that Ted Johns used this as an inside joke when he called the hero of his play, He Won't Come in from the Barn, Aylmer, obviously spelled Elmer.
I haven't heard "Lake Urine" for a while, so that's a battle won, but the linguistic war news is not good. What ever happened to "might," for instance? And what help has our cultural citadel, the university, been? Call me a mean marker, but I'd give 'em a zed.
Andy MacFarlane is a London journalist. His column appears every other Saturday.
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