From childhood I found words interesting. I saw the way words engaged people, and I noticed early that using a big word could win the approval of grown-ups. The idea that silence is golden is irrelevant to children under six years of age. It is only imposed long after the child has learned to charm adults with precocious verbal skills.
Words have power, and every child quickly learns that fact.
When I was growing up, we had a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage and a Shorter Oxford English Dictionary at home. I was lucky: a less wonderful dictionary would not have had the same impact, and Fowler is not as widely known as he should be. While some aspects of childhood were painful, I always enjoyed browsing in Fowler and ‘the dictionary’. Words were a passport to the certainties of adult life, and the dictionary offered the comforting idea of an ordered world. All children crave order amid the uncertainties of childhood.
Fowler was a different matter: here was alphabetical order that did not correspond to any order in the real world. It signified a very quirky view of life indeed. Fowler’s articles are given such unpredictable titles that arranging them in alphabetical order was a kind of random trick — they might just as well have been arranged according to their length. Fowler was an uncourtly retired schoolmaster, an atheist who dutifully accompanied his wife to church each Sunday and waited outside until it was time to take her home again. Fowler was full of delightful surprises.
By happy coincidence, My Fair Lady appeared on stage and screen during the years when my fascination with language was taking hold. The hero of the piece is Henry Higgins, a philologist who sets out to transport Eliza Doolittle from flower-girl to society debutante by teaching her to speak English ‘properly’. Pygmalion, the play on which My Fair Lady is based, was intended by George Bernard Shaw as a vehicle with which to draw attention to the lamentable state of the English language. His preface to Pygmalion contains the following passage:
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past.
The character of Henry Higgins was based on Professor Henry Sweet — a late-nineteenth-century English philologist with blunt manners and an abrasive personality. Those deficiencies had taken a gilded Hollywood glow by the time Rex Harrison played the charming, if chauvinistic, Henry Higgins in the stage version (1956) and then the film (1964). Rex Harrison’s Higgins in the film version reminded me strongly of my absent father. Partly because of that similarity, Higgins became the hero of my youth, and my devotion to language was sealed.
The problem with developing an interest in the workings of the language is that it is hard not to notice the machinery, the stage props, the blunders, and the curiosities. No longer is it possible simply to read or listen: unconsciously, the mind is alert to odd usages, inexplicable idioms, strange connections. This is harmless enough, but inescapable. Soon, even common words provoke further investigation in the dictionary, because every word in the language has a history, and that history passes unnoticed in everyday use. Who would imagine that the word pedigree refers to the shape of a crane’s foot, or that a stove originally referred to a room which was heated, and that it is closely related to Stube, the German word for room?
Once an interest in language takes hold, the ear becomes tuned to the way words are used. This can be distracting. To hear someone refer to an ‘atheist pontificating’ immediately conjures up a logical absurdity, since pontificate derives from the Latin word for Pope, and means ‘to perform the functions of a pontiff or bishop’. How can an atheist pontificate? It jars the ear when a speaker displays their linguistic mastery by referring to a number of octopi, since octopus comes from Greek (not Latin) and the Greek plural is octopodes; but more than this, it is now so thoroughly adopted into English that we should speak of octopuses.
The real difficulty is to keep this habit in check. I would not dream of challenging a person who referred to an ‘atheist pontificating’: the meaning is obvious, and the linguistic slip is unimportant except as a thing of private curiosity. However, there is a great danger that the same bent will lead the afflicted down the dark alley of pedantry, there to lie in wait for the unsuspecting. This is bad. It injures the innocent, and does no service to the language itself: to the contrary, it puts the victim in perpetual fear of the language and its mysteries.
Although Fowler was inclined to be acerbic, his approach was mostly benign. His article about the great and vexed question of split infinitives begins with an astute observation:
The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; (5) those who know & distinguish … those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, & are a happy folk …
Fowler was a realist.
Nevertheless, the habit of noticing how the machinery of language works is a useful one. A well-tuned ear will more quickly spot the occasions, increasingly common, when language is used, not to inform, but to mislead the innocent and unwary. Just as a car enthusiast can quickly detect an odd noise in the motor, likewise the word enthusiast will readily spot evasions, ambiguities, and deceptions.
When a recorded phone message assures us that ‘Your call is important to us’ it is reasonable to wonder what important means, and why phone-answering staff have been ‘down-sized’, thereby making the message necessary. When a government speaks of ‘family values’, and locks innocent children behind razor wire, it is useful to examine the true content of its words.
It is easy to forget how powerful words can be. From the ambiguities of the Delphic Oracle to the deceptions of demagogues, we have recognised the need to be alert to false meanings hidden in homely words and deceptive ideas smuggled in disguise as simple truths. Because of this, I am less apologetic than I might otherwise be for allowing a diversion of my childhood to become a distraction in my grown-up life when (it might be said) I should concentrate on more important things.
When truth matters, language is often the first victim; and, in times of stress, truth matters very much.