Advocates of political correctness justify this abomination by its supposedly charitable motives. We’re supposed to mangle English because otherwise we run the risk of offending a member of one ‘community’ or another.
Well, my friends and I belong to a community too, although a tiny one. It’s made up of people who love the English language and hope it’ll retain its beauty and precision in the face of a worldwide onslaught. Now our sensibilities are offended not just every day, but practically every hour, nay every minute. Yet our ‘community’ isn’t protected by the razor wire of linguistic correctness. We’re supposed to grin and bear it.
The other day, for example, my wife sought an upgrade at a mobile-phone shop. Yet she wasted the trip due to a case of mixed identity. Her credit card identified her as Penelope Boot, but in her properly addressed bill she was Mrs Alexander Boot. The girl at the counter refused even to consider the remote possibility that the two women may be one and the same. She went so far as to point out that ‘Alexander’ was a man’s name and, as my wife was demonstrably a woman, she wasn’t entitled to it. Penelope was, in other words, a fraud.
In a parallel development, she rang a computer technician for help. The ensuing surreal dialogue was utterly offensive not just to linguistic but social propriety. ‘Who am I speaking to?’ ‘This is Mrs Boot?’ ‘Eh, but what’s your name?’ ‘My name is Mrs Boot.’ ‘Yes, but what can I call you?’ ‘You can call me Mrs Boot.’
The technician was a perfectly polite and helpful young man. His was a deficit of education, not manners – he simply wasn’t aware that, unless invited not to, he ought to address formally anyone who’s not friend or family.
We cringe every time a restaurant hostess calls us ‘you guys’. The word ‘guy’ may have entered common parlance courtesy of Guy Fawkes, but for the last two centuries at least it has been strictly American. And even in America it had until relatively recently been used to describe men only. Its unisex sub-American use in Britain isn’t just aesthetically offensive. It’s also unnecessary.
What’s wrong with ‘chap’, ‘man’, ‘lad’, ‘bloke’, ‘son’, ‘fellow’, ‘mate’? These cover the entire spectrum of class, age, regional variation, emotional colouring and colloquialism. What does ‘guy’ bring to the party, other than branding the speaker as an aurally and culturally retarded individual (there, I left ‘individual’ off my list)?
It pains me to sound derisory to our partner in the ‘special relationship’, but most such perversions come from America, more specifically from American TV shows that these days provide the principal source of enlightenment for our youngsters. Thus, when my friend, London-born and bred, rebuked his son for a minor transgression, the boy told him, ‘Don’t make a federal case out of it.’ We have no federal cases, fifth amendments or penitentiaries in this country. However, we do have them galore on TV.
Egalitarian familiarity and demotic usage convey a certain gestalt meaning in America – they spring not so much from ignorance as from ideology. Even an American who reads Virgil and Voltaire in the original will often insist on talking like someone who only ever reads text messages. By doing so he upholds the underlying mock egalitarianism of the American Idea. It is mock egalitarianism because class watersheds are as deep in America as in Britain, and much more jealously guarded.
But, in a country defined by civic, rather than ethnic or cultural, unity, people are brainwashed to convey even in their language that the towering equality of citizenship trumps the implicitly inconsequential inequalities of class, education or style. Thus schoolchildren address teachers by their Christian names, and even highly educated people slip deliberate grammatical errors into their speech.
To someone less imbued with innate egalitarianism this sort of thing jars for being at base phoney and patronising. But when the same linguistic perversions are transplanted into Britain, whose social and cultural instincts have been formed by a dramatically different history, it’s much worse. Epigones can never match up to the original.
In short, I’m offended, and so are my friends. But what recourse have we got? What are we supposed to do? Congratulate people with ‘kids’ on defying the genetic odds by having crossbred with a goat? Pretend we think ‘elevator’ means nothing but a grain storehouse? Refuse to understand ‘momentarily’, when used to mean ‘in a moment’ rather than ‘for a moment’? A fat lot of good that’s going to do us.
If you think that having a normative authority passing judgment on language may help, just look at the French Academy. Though it has been banging its head against the language wall for almost 400 years, French is now bursting with Americanisms, where they are even more incongruous.
No, the cause is well and truly lost. And, as all glorious but hopeless causes, it must therefore be supported by all worthy men. Call it Custer’s last stand… oops! I mean the charge of the Light Brigade.