Words and spellings and grammar and understanding!

I have been reading John Humphrys’ book “Lost for Words”, a kind of book long rant about all the things that intrigue, fascinate and/or annoy him about the English language as she is spoken. Perhaps I enjoy it because I mostly agree with what he says. I wanted to take issue with his wondering when “daily” changed from an adverb into an adjective. His particular example was to the use of “on a daily basis”, instead of simply saying “daily”. And yet, I found myself thinking, what about the Lord’s Prayer and “give us this day our daily bread”?

At one point I wanted to give him a bit of possibly helpful information. He was going on a bit about people saying things like “if I would have known” instead of the simpler, and probably more grammatically correct, “if I had known”. Phil and I are pretty sure that this phenomenon has arisen from speakers of Spanish, Italian and perhaps German or Yiddish, although I cannot claim knowledge of the grammar of the last two, translating directly from their first language when learning English. And so, we hypothesise, the structure slid into American English. In Spanish, for example, you would say, “si hubiera sabido”, using a pluperfect subjunctive. Technical terms - you have to love them. We have decided that this bit of English should be called the New York subjunctive.

At the moment I have reached a point in the book where the good Mr Humphrys is talking about ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. When we were children in school this was not heard of. Some children just could not sit still and pay attention. They were just cinsidered “naughty”.Then in 1991 the syndrome was identified and since then masses of children have been diagnosed as suffering from it and can be prescribed drugs from quite an early age. I once had a boy in a tutor group who had been so diagnosed. It was evident from the word go that he had difficulty simply staying in his seat. And he was seventeen and, you might think, quite old enough to know better. He used to apologise on days when he was really twitchy, telling me, “I’ve not taken my Ritalin today”. He didn’t like taking it; it dulled his senses.

John Humphrys comments, “Many of the greatest men in history showed all the symptoms of ADHD. We might wonder what would have become of them had they been treated with drugs to “cure” their symptoms. Among them were Beethoven, Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso and Thomas Edison.” Precisely!

With words and spellings in mind, here is a link to a prize-winning short story. For those who can’t be bothered to follow the link, here is an extract:-

“Deer Reeder:

First may I say, sorry for any werds I spel rong. Because I am a fox! So don’t rite or spel perfect. But here is how I lerned to rite and spel as gud as I do!

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down, when all of the suden I woslike: Fox 8, crazy nut, when sun goes down, werld goes dark, skedaddle home, or else there can be danjer!

But I was fast and nated by those music werds, and desired to understand them total lee.

So came bak nite upon nite, seeted upon that window, trying to lern. And in time, so many werds came threw my ears and into my brane, that, if I thought upon them, cud understand Yuman prety gud, if I heer it!”

The spelling is, as the opening paragraph warns us, idiosyncratic. It helps if you read it aloud, as I used to do when I first started to read in Italian. Also I was reminded of those posts that people put on social media along the lines of “If yoo caen reed this then yoo had a gud Inglish teecher”.

It is, by the way, worth reading the whole short story for its environmental message.