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.