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Living in a Multilingual World
The one about “correct” English
It don’t ma’er coz it ain’t about being rich or poor, innit?
I had to resist the temptation to correct the speaker on the spot. Also, if I did, where would I start? Would it be the “it don’t” howler? Or the typical London-accented “ma’er”? “Coz”, perhaps? Or, “innit”, again, a Cockney-influenced linguistic prop commonly used by the villagers of Londontown?
And that’s English for you, my dears.
Where do the boundaries of what is considered “good” English start? Where do they end? This was the subject of a fascinating debate many years ago in the pages of Prospect magazine between Simon Heffer, author of Strictly English: The Correct Way toWrite and Oliver Kamm, who had recently penned Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage.
I could write another hundred posts like this one and the message will always be the same: as a non-native speaker, I am truly mesmerised by the seriousness with which the English language is taken. I was never surprised about finding linguistic pedants in my own native Spanish. Nor was I to find them in French, too, when I began to study the language. Both Spanish and French have academies that act as the…
