Paying It Forward : Learn The LANGUAGE

The language we speak - ‘we’ meaning me and those who are reading this - is called “English”.

I’m writing this because of a recent incident, caused by my inability to have complete control over my anger. In essence, and without naming any names (to protect the stupid) here’s what happened: I had tried several times that morning - unsuccessfully - to deliver something to someone, despite leaving a very clear message that I needed to speak to the person about the item and for them to call me at the earliest opportunity. Never happened. Then an hour or two after lunch, someone came to me, basically demanding the item and complaining that it was needed. It was the wrong thing to do. I said that I had tried three or four times already to deliver it, and that it had been available since about 9:00 that morning. I said this in a rather icy, angry tone… and I used the anglo-saxon adjective fucking to describe the item. This unfortunate person said something like “Well, gosh, Leo, you don’t have to cuss at me” and left without taking what he had come for. I marveled. I’m still marveling.

The thing that gets me, here, is that this person, who apparently has aspirations of becoming a politician, has such a poor understanding of english that he is unable to distinguish between a “vulgarity” and a “curse”, and so poor a grasp of grammar that he cannot tell whether an adjective is applied to him or to an inanimate object.

Oh, yes… after I finished laughing, I went once more unto the breech, and delivered the item, so all was well.

In its current state of evolution, English has become quite synthetic. It claims its origin to be the British Isles, part of which is known as “england”, or “angle-land”… probably more along the lines of “ahngluhlond” when it was first used, something around 1500 years ago. Those who called it such, were of course the Angles who crossed the fairly narrow body of Channel / North Sea separating the Isles from Europe.

English is most closely related in basic vocabulary and speech patterns to the languages spoken along the seacost of Europe, from Holland northward, which, needless to say, is exactly where the aforementioned Angles came from, and going north, the Saxons, Danes, Norwegians… and various and sundry others, all of them speaking a version of “Old German”, “Old Norse” and the like. The family of languages those all belong to goes generally under the heading of “Germanic” or “Teutonic”. I like to think of it as “Northern European”, or “NELF” (Northern European Language Family) for short.

If you’ve ever been to Holland, you might have noticed that the Dutch you heard sounded a lot like “baby-talk”… although such a high percentage of the Dutch people speak english that you have to pay attention and kind of eavesdrop just to hear Dutch spoken at all.

An infant growing up in an English-speaking household, whether in the British Isles, North America, Australia, or wherever, learns nearly all of his or her first 500 words from this Northern European family.

There have been several sources or causes of the addition of Southern European (SELF, duh?) to today’s English. The Roman conquest of the British Isles, historically said to have been started by Caesar himself [which at the time was pronounced ky-zer and not see-zer, which explains the titles of the rulers of the germanic and russian states]; and, of course; the “Roman” “Catholic” Church and its versions of latin; the “Norman” conquest of 1066; the rise of “Science” beginning after the fall of the Eastern Empire (the flood of refugees - and the books they brought with them - from fifteenth-century Islamic expansion being a chief prod towards the so-called Renaissance) and the printing press.

The attitude, which exists yet, that Southern European terminology is “good” and Northern European terminology is “bad”, persists even today. If you come across a steaming brown pile of … something … it’s socially acceptable for you to call it “feces” but not “shit”. The mental image brought to one’s mind is absolutely the same in either case, but for some reason or reasons (more about this later) the one is okay, and the other is “vulgar”.

Worse, I venture to say that the vast majority of those who are offended by shit but not by feces, offended by piss but not by urine, offended by cunt by not by vulva, offended by fuck but not by sexual intercourse… the vast majority of these, I say, will confound “vulgar” with “obscene” and “blasphemous” even simple “dirty”… as though these terms were absolutely interchangeable.

It makes me want to puke. The only thing that’s even remotely redemptive is what I see as the fact that this has been done to those people intentionally. Why? Because it’s so much easier to control people who think they understand your words, and agree that what you say is what you want them to think it is rather than what it actually means.

See my previous rant about “person”.

More, later.