An E Ticket for English by Michael Bonin, Ph

An E Ticket for English by Michael Bonin, Ph. D. , English Department Head One summer during my college years I worked at Disneyland. I was a skipper on the Jungle Boat Cruise, a job with considerable prestige amongst the thousands of Disney “cast members,” as park work- ers were called. For one thing, Jungle Boat skippers got to wear a cool Indiana Jones hat and khaki pants, rather than the awesomely dorkoid electric-blue double-knit Dacron zippered jumpsuits ride operators wore in Tomorrowland. The Three Little Pigs had it worst of all, claustrophobic and blind in a hot, giant plastic pig head, always being shoved to the ground by mean teenagers. Jungle Boat skippers never put up with that crap. I can’t believe Disney’s liability attorneys permit- ted it, but we had real Smith and Wesson .38 service revolvers holstered at the helm, for shooting at the fi berglass hippos. We knew they fi red blanks, but the passengers didn’t, and the report and cordite smoke were authentic. Those teenagers minded their manners on our boat. See, on the Jungle Boat we were the ride. The skipper narrated the cruise through the jungle, delivering a sort of safari-guide stand-up routine. Welcome aboard the Leaky Tiki. I’m Michael, and I’ll be your skipper for the next three days and two romantic nights in the jungle. Take a seat – there’s no dancing in the back there, folks. no dancing. Dancing is only allowed on the promenade deck. As we pull away from the dock, I’d like you to turn and wave to all the smiling natives we leave behind. You may never see them again. As we make our way down the Irrawaddy River, feel the mist on your face. Don’t worry. That’s just the mon- keys in the trees. Up ahead, you’ll notice an alligator playing with an elephant. That’s something you don’t see every day. (Long pause) But I do. You may groan – my passengers sure did – but as summer jobs go, it wasn’t a bad way to make some money. (Did you know Disneyland ride operators belong to the Teamsters union? Boarding school teachers, by the way, do not.) But looking back at it now, after over thirty years in the classroom, I wonder if I ever really left the Leaky Tiki. I still wear khakis to work. And I’m still standing at the helm, talking to keep a captive audience interested and amused. I don’t have the Smith and Wesson anymore, but the Abbey teenagers don’t usually need gunplay to keep them in line. PORTSMOUTH ABBEY SCHOOL Now, boarding school is no amusement park, in case you were wondering. But I still think of my- self as a tour guide to English. For instance, in the Winter Term I teach my Sixth Formers the history of the English language. For some reason they don’t expect to be fascinated by Verner’s Law, which describes fric- ative voicing in Proto-Germanic languages, or the Great Vowel Shift of 1350. Yet as we chug our way down the ages, every bend in the linguistic river offers something of interest, at least by admittedly low English teacher standards. I’ll throttle down here so we can take a look at “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the very fi rst poem in English literature. Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard, meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs ece drihten, or onstealde. 4 He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend; þa middangeard moncynnes weard ece drihten, æfter teode 8 fi rum foldan, frea ælmihtig “Middangeard” in line 7 means “middle-earth,” the realm of mankind, and that’s the Anglo-Saxon word Tolkien lifted for his Lord of the Rings saga, for Tolkien was the Bosworth and Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. And that odd-looking letter at the beginning of the line, in the word “þa,” is called a “thorn,” an ancient rune which represented the “th” sound in Old English. Printing presses didn’t have runic symbols, of course, so centuries later the thorn was printed using a “y”– which is how “the” becomes “ye” in faux-archaic formulations such as “Ye Olde Souvenir Shoppe.” Cruise another three centuries down the English river and we meet the Vikings, which is much more pleasant from our vantage point than when the English were meeting actual Vikings. Our language doesn’t have a lot of Norse words, but the words which did make it into English are suggestive. Anger Slaughter Ransack Knife Scare Skin Outlaw Ugly Skull Scorch Wrong There you have, in a nutshell, what it was like when Vikings dropped by. The sightseeing is much more pleasant once we reach Chaucer, writing after the Norman ruling class had put Anglo-Saxon through a French press for 300 years, so that Middle English sounds virtually like a Romance language, soft and melodious. Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the fl our... 4 And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The holy blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke. That “shire” (“county”) in line 5 makes the hobbit fans onboard perk up again, and they like learning that the local constable would therefore be called the “shire-reeve” or, as a Nottingham peasant would pro- nounce it, “sheriff.” WINTER BULLETIN 2014 The Jungle of English Cruise hasn’t reached familiar territory yet, so I still have my passengers’ attention. Yet even when we arrive at Shakespeare and Early Modern English, virtually a home away from home for Abbey students, all steeped in the classics, there are a few curious sites to point out along the Thames. Off to starboard, for instance, not far from the Globe The- atre, is the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, in 1599 already the oldest mental hospital in Europe. Of course, no Cockney would pro- nounce “Bethlehem” the way we do – to him it would be “bed- lam,” and that’s where we get our word for absolute madness. In fact, to capture the original sound of Shakespearean English, I tell the students to imagine that in Elizabethan England every day was National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Try it out, matey. Frinds, Roomuns, coontrimun, lend me yurr eers. Oy coom too berry Sayzure, nut too preyze im. Thee eevul that men doo livz aafturr theym, The gewd iz aft inturrid with thyr boonz. Eventually the Leaky Tiki returns to the dock, and it’s time for me to unload the boat. Now comes the most dangerous part of our journey. you guys trying to get out of the parking lot. Please exit the boat the same way you entered – pushing and shoving. Any children left behind will be taken to It’s a Small World and forced to sing that dreadful song forever. Please be sure to tell your friends how much you enjoyed the Jungle Cruise. It helps keeps the lines short. Disneyland calls itself “The Happiest Place on Earth,” a most dubious claim since, at least while I worked there, they didn’t serve alcohol anywhere in the park. But these days, as I stand at the lectern and watch the students fi le into my classroom, I can almost feel the Leaky Tiki rocking gently under my feet, ready to get underway – and I’m pretty happy. Michael Bonin is the head of the English Department and holds the Dom Damian Kearney Chair in English. For thirteen years he was an English professor at Gon- zaga University, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, Milton, writing, and public speaking. From 1995-2001, he was chair of Gonzaga’s English Department. He recieved Gonzaga’s Teacher of the Year award in 1995 and the Abbey’s Dom Peter Sidler Award for teaching excellence in 2008. He has given conference presentations and published articles in scholarly journals on the topics of Renaissance literature, 18th - Century art, moral education, and academic freedom. Michael spent part of 2008 in London on a fellowship at the Globe Theatre during its productions of King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Michael coaches boys’ varsity squash and advises the Sixth Form student speakers for church assemblies. He lives on campus with his wife, Laureen, who is also a member of the English Department, and their children, Drake ‘11, Fletcher ‘13 and Sydell. PORTSMOUTH ABBEY SCHOOL.

Load more