ENGLISH LANGUAGE - AN ENDANGERED SPECIES [2]

English has spread widely as an international language, partly because of American global dominance, but mainly, I think, because it has rid itself of a lot of fiddling details that still bedevil other languages. It is not cluttered by diacritical marks, umlauts, accents, cedillas, and the like. It is rarely bothered by gender, whereas in European travel your French feminine shirt is suddenly neutered as you pass into Germany. It is possible to speak faultless English while remaining blissfully ignorant of the subjunctive (though old people sometimes like to play with it as an intellectual exercise).

On the other hand it has a number of ineradicable disadvantages. One is its irregularity of spelling and pronunciation - the 'cough, bough, rough' syndrome is frequently held up to scorn by rivals. Another is its unwillingness to abide by any set of rules - the moment you have sorted out a clear mnemonic the exceptions come crowding in. All the more reason, then, to cling to whatever basic principles can be established.

Take the simple word 'cover' for example. (Pronounced 'kuvv-er', for those of you in the back row.) Characteristically for an English word it has an array of uses. When we put the lid on something we 'cover' it. What we put on it is a 'cover'. The item is then 'covered'. When we take the lid off we 'discover' what is underneath. We tell the world of our 'discovery'. On the other hand if we 'uncover' something we hint that we have found something a bit shady - under-cover. With luck we may 'recover' the stolen goods that have been hidden by the thief. (But notice the subtlety of the language - 're-cover', with the hyphen written or implied by intonation, is something you do only to books, armchairs, and the like.) All this is connected to the basic word 'cover'; and once a newcomer to the language has managed to grasp that we are in the same league as 'lover' (but not 'hover' or 'Dover') then all is plain sailing.

Why on earth then do some people suddenly introduce a different pronunciation? An alternative (older) version of the adjective is 'covert' - still meaning 'with a lid on', and pronounced 'kuvvert'; still intimately connected by pronunciation and meaning to our basic 'cover'. Secret operations are carried out under cover; they are therefore 'covert'. They are carried out 'covertly'. If you happen to be a small wild animal being pursued by red-jacketed men with dogs you may seek cover in a covert, a patch of dense foliage. The owner of the land, in the days when men still wore overcoats, might sport a covert coat, a short overcoat suitable for tramping through the undergrowth covering the covert. If he bred horses he would have his own technical use for the word.

All this richness of language is organised under the word 'cover', and we do language a disservice if we deck it out with fancy pronunciations which seem to indicate that 'covert' is just any odd word that happened to be lying about so we grabbed it. And we make the language just that bit more difficult for the newcomer.

None of this has anything to do with 'cove' [COEv] - a curved inlet in a coastline (or a rather disreputable figure in an Edwardian novel).

But just as you think that it's all very easy really, notice the Cornish village of Coverack - pronounced not 'kuvver-ak' but 'cov-rak'. Ah, well.

PAR POND




Par Pond is a small unassuming development by the council of a natural area between two villages. It seems to be practically free of vandalism, and to be appreciated by visitors, especially the wild life.

ARLINGTON COURT

Arlington Court is a National Trust property on the western edge of Exmoor. The house itself is lumpy externally, but rather splendidly domestic inside. The grounds range from a Victorian formal garden to tracks through the wilder bits of the estate, including a lake.

There is a very fine collection of horse-drawn carriages of all kinds, housed in a special block of the stables, and visitors can take horse-drawn rides at a sober clop round the grounds. However, I caught the equipage just after the last amble of the day, when the horses were travelling light on their way back to the stables.

CAN YOU EXPLAIN BEES?

It is a warm day. We sit in the conservatory, with all windows and doors open. A bee blunders in. He decides he is in the wrong place, and hurls himself at the nearest window. He seems baffled by the fact that he cannot push through the glass. However, he determinedly chooses another window, with the same result. And another...and another...and...

What he never seems to do is to fly out through the wide-open door, even though he sometimes flies right past it. Eventually, when he is reduced to a quivering bundle on a window-ledge, I take pity, scoop him up, and release him into the outside world, where he seems to fly off with relief.

How is it that an animal that is bright enough to be able to build a honeycomb based on angles of 120 degrees (a task that would baffle a lot of our children) seems unable to understand that open doors work both ways?

ENGLISH LANGUAGE - AN ENDANGERED SPECIES [1]

I had the tremendous advantage of having been born into the golden age of broadcasting. It was technically primitive - we listened to an unamplified signal through headphones, and if anyone turned over the newspaper the message was momentarily drowned.

This side of things improved quite quickly, but it was still John Reith's BBC we heard. This had its absurdities; the most remembered I suppose being the rule that news readers had to wear dinner jackets. Sundays were drear, with a great bias towards propagating the faith; and commentaries on current events, always with a proper respect for the (usually Conservative) government, tended to be delivered in the kind of hearty condescending voice that was before long to be heard making encouraging noises about the British war effort on news films.

What we heard, however, was generally the King's English - a form of lingua franca among the educated. There were some things wrong with this concept, particularly because it seemed to perpetuate class distinctions which many of us wished to see toned down if not eradicated. But it did represent a way of thinking and expression which was distinguished by a sense of clarity, a width of reference, and a delight in the sheer pleasure of employing a skill which had produced, and could still produce, melodious trenchant utterance. I don't know that we ever consciously imitated this style, much less made any attempt to learn it, but it did echo in our ears, and we absorbed it through the pores. [Not all radio influence was good, though: I remember Miss Winnington Hill, Head of English, fighting a despairing battle against a popular song of the time with the refrain 'Any umberellas, any umberellas...'] Still, if we did not always know how to speak, it was a comfort to know that out there were people who did, and that for the first time in history such speech was easily available to anyone who cared to listen.

Not so now. Half the population does not know how to speak, and if anyone listens to radio or TV he will hear a rag-bag of usage which has neither rhyme nor reason, and is no help at all. The heir to the heir to the throne speaks in a kind of suburban mumble: small hope for the King's English there, then. But it might yet be possible to insert a little discipline into the use of our precious language by the application of some clear thinking. Otherwise we shall continue to hear university professors who are happy to contrast the situation in Grea' Bri'ain with that prevailing on the Con'inen'. So here goes - a still small voice.

People Who Do Things

English is good at making a word adopt all sorts of useful functions. So you can say 'I can't stand this heat', or 'Heat the milk first', or 'Gas heater', or 'Use low heat', or 'He became quite heated', or...... But you need to adapt the right word in the first place.

Take a company that conTRACTS (verb) to do a job. It is a conTRACTor (noun). The fact that in this case there is another noun for the CONtract it has signed does nothing to stop its being a conTRACTor.

People who join in a PROtest (noun) wish to proTEST (verb). They are proTESTors. You take your name from what you do, not from what you're interested in.

So, subSCRIBers, not SUBscribers. And reSEARCHers, not REsearchers, and.........

Generally, people or things that do things are stressed on the second syllable [ti-TUM-ti]. There are oddities. What you do to food is to PROcess it. So you whizz food in a PROcessor. Since it is possible to proCESS - to walk in a procession - you would expect a person taking part in it to be a proCESSor, but he isn't, he is a proCESSioner. Though a person who proFESSes a particular skill is a proFESSor.

But then, I never promised it would be easy, did I? Think of it as a kind of mental jogging. Anyway, if you will promise to stop talking about CONtracters, and SUBscribers, and PROtestors, and CONtributers, and........ we shall have between us scrubbed the English language clean of some obscuring fungus.

More to come.

DIANA - NOT MY PRINCESS

So we have had what many of us hope is the last of the Princess Di weep-ins. Of course one is saddened by the loss of a young and vibrant life in sordid circumstances, but it was a story she chose to live in, and the situation is by no means as clear-cut as her mourners seem to suggest.

Clearly Charles dithered over his relationship with Camilla until it was too late. Obviously, then, he had to be offered the solution usually adopted in such circumstances, of the Royal Personage being allowed to keep his true love as a discreet mistress, while being paired off with a suitably nubile partner for official breeding purposes in order to maintain the line. Nobody is going to object to that, unless one happens to be the kind of starry-eyed fantasist who believes that all members of the royal family are by nature noble, and that it is the function of the aristocracy to lead us lower orders in the paths of righteousness.

So, what went wrong? Can we really be expected to believe that a sweet young princess was decoyed into a sophisticated and cynical world totally beyond her comprehension? Certainly her father must have known what was going on, and even if his self-satisfaction did not allow him to give her sound advice before shuffling her up the aisle it has long been common knowledge that her mother, who had got out of the family situation much earlier, warned her strongly to re-consider. Besides, young as Diana was seen to be, she was no simple milkmaid from a fantasy country idyll. The manipulative ogling that was displayed as the marriage fell apart had not been learnt in a few months, nor the ease with which she consoled herself afterwards with glitzy company and fast cars.

The whole Spenser family made a risky investment offering rich returns, and, as many of us simpler souls are aware, if you do that the chances are that you will end up badly burned. That one of those involved was an attractive young butterfly who was eventually scorched to death is a cause for quiet sorrow, but not for sanctification.

And the royal family? They are by education and tradition case-hardened to events such as these, by no means unique in the rough island story. From the Queen down, they were prepared to ignore the whole sordid affair once it was over. The hysterical outburst of sentimental public opinion which followed forced them to engage in ritual gestures of sorrow. I doubt very much whether it has much endeared them to the great soft-centered British public, and will certainly not have endeared her subjects to the monarch.

MORE DESTRUCTIVE DIRECTORS

I complained on 22 March of the antics of foolish stage directors, perhaps with a half sense that this was yet another sign of the daftness of the contemporary world.

I am relieved in some ways to have come across a reference to Alec Guiness's production of Hamlet in the 1960s, in which Ken Tynan, playing the Player King, was required to wear a large false plastic ear for Lucianus to pour the poison into, for all the world, as Tynan put it, as if it were 'an advertisement for a proprietary brand of rum'. So arrant stupidity is not, after all, a characteristic of directors of the twenty-first century only.

There seemed to be more point, in a production in which I was involved, in putting the Players to act in half-masks, to detach them from the real world. The only snag from my point of view, in this and other productions, has been that actors always want to keep their masks as souvenirs, so that I have no reminders of all the work that went into designing and making them. In this case I put Lucianus into black and silver, corvine, with a laid-back plume, and Prologue into scarlet and gold, cocky, with a tuft on top, rather, in retrospect, like a cross between a cock and a hooded kestrel (a coistrel ?- see Twelfth Night)

The two lads playing the parts could not agree who should wear which, so they ended by changing parts each night. I can't remember who took home which, but certainly I never saw them again. So eventually I had to make a set of display masks for an imaginary ballet of the Four Elements to put up at home. The picture, in case you have been wondering what it had to do with directors, is such a mask, for Water, shown only in the hot dry months of summer. Perhaps it has been performing a rain dance.

WEATHER PANIC OVER

No, it's all right, the world is not going to drown after all. Since my gloom and doom of 06 July, with evocations of Noah, and similar predictions of disaster, the weather has swung round and we have had days of sunshine and warmth.

Not so sunny today, though, is it?

When you have been around a little longer you will realise that there is no guarantee attached to the weather. We are, after all, British. Just enjoy it while it is there. I assume that you are not surrounded by forest fires in your area.