Mind Your Language at Home No. 20 Articles about Language Dear Language Minders, Welcome to this brave new world of virus variants and vaccinations! It was recently reported that the government is being urged to create opportunities for Britons to learn languages like Polish, Urdu and Punjabi, From Seaspeak to Singlish: celebrating other kinds of English By Rosie Driffill in The Guardian in order to effect more social cohesion. According to Cambridge professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett, language learning, and indeed social integration, should not be a one-way street; rather, the onus should also fall on British people to learn community languages. For me, this idea of a two-way street taps into a wider question about linguistic influence and evolution. There is interest and joy to be had not only in learning the languages of other cultures, but also in appreciating the effect they might have had on English. Part of that process is ceding British English to the prospect of change, noting the ways in which ethnically marked forms of English, such as Bangladeshi and African-Caribbean varieties, have played their part in shaping how new generations across the country will speak: take Multi- Cultural London English, the dialect that has almost completely replaced Cockney on the streets of the capital. Advertisement Outside the UK too, creoles and dialects have bent, broken and downright flipped the bird at the rules, offering not only musicality and freshness, but new ways of conceiving of language that staunch protectionism doesn’t allow for. Grammar rules have their place, of course, insofar as they offer a framework for precision and comprehension. But rules can be learned to be broken, leading to the formation of identities, cultural protests and unique means of expression. Not persuaded? Then consider these examples of syntactic rule-bending and linguistic intermarriage that have taken English into intriguing and delightful new directions. Irish English Otherwise known as Hiberno-English, this refers to dialects spoken across the island of Ireland. Frank McCourt immortalised West and South-West Irish English in his memoir Angela’s Ashes, with its liberal use of the definite article (“Do you like the Shakespeare, Frankie?”), and the unbidden musicality that comes with inverted word order (“Is it a millionaire you think I am?”). Some of my friends from Northern Ireland will plump for the past simple form of a verb where a past participle is usually required, saying things like: “They’d never have did it had they knew.” Rule breaking at its most ballsy: and it’s music to my ears. Singlish Short for Colloquial Singaporean English, a creole language for which English is the lexifier (meaning it provides the basis for most of its vocabulary) plus words from Malay, Tamil and varieties of Chinese. The Singaporean government rallies against it at every turn with Speak Good English campaigns, to the detriment of some extremely interesting grammatical structures. Take Singlish’s being topic-prominent, for example: like in Mandarin, this means that Singlish sentences will sometimes start with a topic (or a known reference of the conversation), followed by a comment (or some new information). For example, “I go restaurant wait for you.” Grammatically, it’s worlds apart from “I’ll be waiting for you at the restaurant,” but it’s evolved in a region where that kind of sentence structure is the order of the day. Belizean creole (Belize Kriol) Another English-based creole language, similar to Jamaican patois, which offers some compelling takes on tense. The present tense verb does not indicate number or person, while the past is indicated by putting the tense marker mi in front of the verb (“ai mi ron” - I ran), but this is optional and considered superfluous if a time marker like “yestudeh” (yesterday) is used. Basic English Basic English was invented by CK Ogden in 1930. Designed to allow language learners to acquire English quickly and communicate at a very basic level, Ogden managed to reduce the language to 850 words, including only eighteen verbs! Seaspeak A controlled natural language (CNL) based on English that provides a lingua franca for sea captains to communicate. First conceived in 1985, the premise is simple, grammar-free phrases that facilitate comprehension in often fraught and dangerous situations. It has now been codified as Standard Marine Communication Phrases. Ultimately, English grammar has always been in flux: both in its native land and abroad. When it comes to ‘offshoots’ of the language, whatever label we apply – be it dialect, patois, creole or CNL – each exists as a yardstick for linguistic evolution, and ought to be celebrated as such. Art of the one-liner: wit and grit for a deadly hit By Gary Nunn form The Guardian And why the late, great Carrie Fisher deserves to join Oscar Wilde, Groucho Marx and Dorothy Parker as one of the genre’s most brilliant exponents For a while, I had the perfect tagline on my dating profile, and it was all thanks to the wit of Carrie Fisher: “Instant gratification takes too long.” It alerted me to the dimmer bulbs in the chandelier. “Your tagline makes no sense. What could be quicker than instant?” Blocked! But: “Great Postcards from the Edge quote there” = date request! Alas, that led to little success so I’m again taking Fisher’s advice, as echoed by Meryl Streep this month: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” The art I’ve decided to make is to discover the world’s best one- liner. This one’s for you, Carrie: Some one-liners are so great, they’ve become their own cliches. Some characters deserve their own category for speaking almost exclusively in them - take a bow, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, Mae West, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou. Advertisement What makes a great one-liner? Certainly not an inspirational quote in an infuriatingly pretty font over an evocative filtered landscape. They are more likely to be bawdy, rambunctious and not always kind. The edge makes them memorable, although that’s not to say they can’t be profound. Straight-up humour isn’t enough: the funniest one-liners have a sardonic, sarcastic or even bitchy undertone. The dreamier ones need a tinge of sadness or bitterness. Those offering guidance need to insinuate it’s advice the author of the phrase wistfully - or bitterly - wishes they’d taken themselves. Concision is essential. Some wordplay will make the ‘inspirational’ one liner forgivable for its linguistic merit. Don’t state the bleeding obvious: tell us something counterintuitive, or something that reveals the grit of your struggle and how you’ve mastered words as your response. Retorts are out; if you need someone to rack up a line for you to knock down, then strictly speaking that isn’t a one-liner. It should include all its wit, grit and tips in that standalone line. Metaphors, self-deprecation and genuine poignancy are in. With those criteria in mind, here’s my - unapologetically subjective - stab at the shortlist of the world’s greatest one-liners of all time: Self-deprecating “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” - Dolly Parton “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted” - Mae West “My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain” - WH Auden Wordplay “I can resist everything, except temptation” - Oscar Wilde “Better to be looked over than overlooked” - Mae West “There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t” - Robert Benchley Perceptive “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself” – Albert Einstein “Faith: not wanting to know what is true” - Friedrich Nietzsche “Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung” - Voltaire “Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research” - Wilson Mizner “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo” - HG Wells Sardonic “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it” - Groucho Marx “Every love’s the love before in a duller dress” - Dorothy Parker “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” - Ambrose Bierce “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me” - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (and Olympia Dukakis in Steel Magnolias, of course) Underrated “Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length” - Robert Frost “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” - Derek Bok Just brilliant “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think” - Dorothy Parker “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about” - Oscar Wilde Advice “When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time” - Maya Angelou “When you’re going through hell, keep going” - Winston Churchill “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” - Coco Chanel Poignant “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple” - Dr Seuss “At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide” - F Scott Fitzgerald Inspirational “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” - Oscar Wilde “It is never too late to be what you might have been” - George Eliot “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” – Eleanor Roosevelt “If everything is under control, you are going too slow” - Mario Andretti I can relate “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life” - Lawrence Kasdan I’d best wrap this up because: “He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink” - John Ray And finally, take all these with a pinch of salt because: “The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general” - Stefan Kanfer Why Italians Use Dozens of Words for Simple Instructions And other examples of why more is more in Italy In Italy, you’ll find signs about face masks with 40 words in bureaucratic language.