This is what today called having a ‘restricted’ or ‘specialized’ knowledge of English, and we have come to recognize increasingly not merely this limited degree of linguistic ability but also its potential value. Few people have the time that is required to master a ‘full’ knowledge of a foreign language and fewer still would be able to make much practical use of such a knowledge. Indeed, as has already been implied and as we shall see more clearly later, even as native speakers we vary greatly in the number and variety of fields of discourse in which we can feel at home.
Legal phrases are rather long, strictly ungrammatical bits of English language used by judges and barristers when they want to keep talking and give their brains a much-needed rest. They also use them to show that they’ve been in Court before and know the sort of things that barristers and judges do say, every quarter of an hour or so, to assure each other that they’re all friends and have all been brought up the same way. No one would think of using any of them except a barrister or a judge talking the argot, and a witness who suddenly said ‘In my humble submission’ would be instantly and laughably shown up as some kind of imbecile.
‘With the greatest respect…’
This, of course, means with no respect at all.
In Mulcaster’s time, when the prestige of English was low, many people felt the urgent need to enrich the language by adopting foreign words, and today English has many thousands of originally foreign words in its vocabulary: ease from French, for example, and area from Latin. It is now the turn of English to supply words to other languages.
Language is the dress of though.
It would be a big mistake to dismiss the ‘easy’ uses of language as trivial and unimportant merely because they seem so ordinary. Indeed, the more ordinary they seem, the more obvious it should be that we start from them in considering the use of English or any other language. If they seem ordinary, it is this very fact that makes the use of English seem difficult when we are writing an essay or describing some complicated chemical experiment: difficult because unfamiliar and extraordinary. And again, at the risk of being repetitive and obvious, we must stress that it is not that the subject is ‘unfamiliar and extraordinary’. We may have a perfectly clear understanding of the experiment and the essay may be on our favourite hobby. It is the use to which we are putting our language that is unfamiliar.
A paper-boy, a sixth-former, and a new graduate may be equally skillful in teasing, shouting instructions on the games-field, grumbling - or even swearing. They may be as skillful as each other or as Mr Graham Greene in any of these uses of language. But their skill will probably be unequal when it comes to drafting a letter, writing a report, or making a formal speech, because these last - for all their importance - are relatively rare and sophisticated uses of language. They might fairly be called ‘exotic’ - a term particularly apt for written language, in which we all need special training, which cannot be said to ‘come naturally’, and which has its own set of special rules and conventions. And if the word ‘exotic’ suggests ‘glamorous’, we are not bing led perhaps so very far from the mark, since ‘glamour’ itself was originally a variant form of ‘grammar’.
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.
But language does not only have this restrictive influence on thought: language also conditions our thinking in a positive and constructive way. In discussing a little earlier in this chapter how language released emotion, it was pointed out that a person might have a pent-up feeling if he could not find the words to describe an experience. This is very largely because we feel that we have not thoroughly apprehended something if we are unable to put it into words.
Not all of us depend to the same extent on words when we are thinking to ourselves, but it is certain that, in general, thinking and decision-making are vastly supported and facilitated by language, even though we may be using the language silently.
The importance of language in making distinctions is also seen in considering people who suffer from such condition as ‘nominal aphaisa’. Professor Ullmann has told us of one psychologist’s experiment with a patient who had completely forgotten the names of colours but who had retained perfectly good colour vision:
Asked to choose from among a number of coloured threads those belonging to the same category, he found the task impossible and even meaningless. To him all the threads were different in colour. And so they were in actual fact, as far as their purely visual appearance was concerned. By losing the names, the verbal labels, the patient had also lost the principle of classification, the faculty of subordinating individual differences to some higher unity, the habit of introducing some man-made lines of division into the unbroken continuity of the natural scale of colours. Thanks to language, the spectrum had been divided up and had become articulate; with the loss of the verbal signposts, it had relapsed into chaos.
We become aware that there is such a thing as linguistic etiquette and linguistic tact. There are ‘right’ things to say and write, just as there are ‘right’ things to wear.
Even in England it is difficult to speak of a standard in pronunciation. For one thing, pronunciation is infinitely variable, so that even given the will to adopt a single pronunciation, it would be difficult to achieve. The word dance may be pronounced in a dozen ways even by people who do not think of themselves as dialect speakers: there is no sure way of any two people saying the same word with precisely the same sound. In this respect, pronunciation is much more closely resembles handwriting than spelling. In spelling, there are absolute distinctions which can be learnt and imitated with complete precision: one can know at once whether a word is spelt in a ‘standard’ way or not. But two persons’ handwriting and pronunciation may both be perfectly intelligible, yet have obvious differences without out being able to say which is ‘better’ or more ‘standard’.
Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.
Most of us are fairly easily convinced that, although none of our close friend thinks we are objectionable when we have an open-neck shirt, a potential employer most certainly would if we were thus dressed at an interview. In just the same way, we come to be aware of which grammatical conventions pass muster among our friends and which need adjustment when we are in touch with a wider circle.
There is more convention than logic in matters of dress, and the same applies to language.
This is what is meant by saying that knowing the meaning of a word is knowing how to use it, and it must lead us to take warning in one important respect. Vocabulary is the ‘open end’ of language: we spend our lives enlarging our knowledge of words. The more we can do to enlarge that knowledge, the more we can attain the satisfaction of knowing precisely what we are enjoying and being able to share that knowledge with those around us. But words are to be thought of rather as tools than as medals and ornaments. We would think a man ridiculous who bought an electric typewriter only for show and kept it on display in his drawing-room. Enlarged vocabulary is equally a ridiculous acquisition without the corresponding knowledge of how the words we have learnt are in fact used and of where they serve a useful purpose.
There are as many varieties of English in literature as there are outside it, to the extent that literature imitates life.
This is not to deny that language has its own kind of superiority in simultaneous presentation - as is shown by a word like ‘garden’ as compared with the visual image which is a manifold of flowers, grass, shrubs, pathway, and greenhouse. But the fact remains that one of the striking characteristics of human language is its serial nature. Whether we are speaking or writing, we are obliged to produce linguistic signs in a linear string. A pianist playing a piece of polyphonic music is able to ‘say’ two or more things simultaneously: even when he strikes a single chord, one has an instance of the simultaneous transmission of a structure impossible for the human voice, which can produce only one note at a time. Mathematics too displays the advantageous power of simultaneous as opposed to serial presentation when we come upon a mathematical expression.
Walking is a private activity: so long as our method of locomotion gets us from A to B, we may be content; we do not depend on other people’s approval, co-operation, or indeed presence. But talking - the use of language - is social; it depends for its success on doing something not merely as we ourselves like to do it.
In other words they constitute a cliche, and because (whether we like it or not) most of the ordinary use of English is thoroughly saturated with cliches, most of us come to expect that there is a good deal of redundancy in what we are hearing or reading. Indeed, redundancy is a natural and necessary factor in all use of language: without it, any momentary inattention or mispronounciation or misprint or the intrusion of ‘noise’ of any kind would make comprehension impossible; and even without such intrusions, the degree of concentration necessary to understand anything would exhaust most of us.