YIKES! Tomorrow it's September 15th so halfway through the month, and the date of my so-called "presentation" on Elizabethan English to Lynda's local U3A "Making of English" group is getting ever nearer, and how many lines have I written for it so far? Exactly 10 !!!!
Lynda (centre), accomplished ukulele player
and leader of our local U3A "Making of English" group
What madness!!! Unless I can think of some more things to say, my so-called "presentation" is going to last a pathetic 3 minutes !!!!!
me and Lynda discussing group business
on zoom
At the moment I'm trying to prove that our present-day English ISN'T descended from London English, as a lot of worthy language history so-called "experts" have been suggesting for so long. What I'm saying is that English is basically a totally crazy language, with an insane mixture of grammar that can only have resulted from a senseless mixing of several different dialects. Don't you agree?
Why can't we use the word "what" in sentences like this, for example: “Are you the little bastards what hit my
little son over the head?” (see also below). We can say "who" and "which", so why can't we say "what", like all the "incorrect" speakers do ??? It's all madness isn't it!
And why do we have only one "correct" word for "you", whether we're speaking to one person or a hundred people? "Incorrect" speakers know that that's not adequate, and that's why they've invented words like "youse" and "y'all". Makes sense when you think of it, doesn't it!
And no other language in the world has a crazy present tense for verbs like what [sic] we have in "Standard English": I go / you go / he/she/it goes / we go / you go / they go. It doesn't map onto any previous dialect or onto Anglo-Saxon or anything. It just developed out of thin air, and now we're stuck with it - what madness !!!!
English is the world's most illogical language, and it's simply because it evolved as a kind of a compromise between a lot of different regional dialects. Can YOU think of some crazy things about our language that just don't make any sense? I bet you can!!!
Today I get a major breakthrough, when I discover that in Shakespeare's time, London's butcher's boys came from all over the country, bringing their "country English" into the heart of the capital. And maybe this was true of all such trades. What do you think?
This revealing map shows all the towns where London's butcher's boys in the late 16th century came from - some of them could have sold meat to Shakespeare, and influenced his use of English, but who knows!
What a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days!!!! Butchers' boys flooding into London and bringing their country slang words and non-standard grammar with them. No wonder we speak such a crazy language today, that's for sure!
a typical Elizabethan butcher's boy learning his trade
and spreading his country slang to whoever he speaks to, bless him!!!!
And maybe Shakespeare had some butcher boy's "country English" in his head when he wrote about Shylock in his play The Merchant of Venice asking for "a pound of flesh". I think we should be told!
[I think you'd better make your so-called "presentation" a lot more scholarly than this rubbish, if you want to impress Lynda's U3A group members! - Ed]
However, before you plunge too enthusiastically into using bad grammar, did you know that bad grammar is associated with bad behaviour?
This is what language pundit Prof. Jenny Cheshire discovered in Reading in the early 1980's. She got to know groups of kids in the town's playgrounds, and noted down how often they made "mistakes" in English like the following, before asking them also about how they spent their time, finding out whether they were "good" boys or "bad" boys, and "good" girls or "bad" girls. Whether they were "naughty or nice", in other words:
Prof. Cheshire found that boys in general were much more likely than girls to use these types of expression, and that, among the girls, these expressions were used mostly by the "bad girls" who approved of all sorts of bad behaviour (Group B), and generally used less by the "good girls" (Group A).
Bad grammar was kind of a membership badge among the kids who behaved badly and it was an integral part of the "bad" kids' culture, Prof. Cheshire discovered.
Jenny Cheshire, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics,
University of London
Fascinating stuff!
[It may be fascinating, but it's not getting you much further forward with your so-called "presentation", Colin, is it !!!! - Ed]
[Come on, knuckle down to it, stop messing about, and do some proper work for a change! - Ed]
16:00 There was some alarming news on the Onion Website earlier today, and Lois and I discuss it over our tea and biscuits on the sofa this afternoon.
MALVERN, Worcs—Confused by the man outside who was not
wearing a Royal Mail uniform or carrying a package of any kind, local
suburbanites expressed bafflement Thursday when they looked out their front
windows and saw a person walk by who wasn’t delivering anything.
“Huh, our Amazon orders have already come today, so what’s
this guy doing?” said resident Felicity Truesdale, admitting she was at a loss
to explain the presence of an individual outdoors who was dressed in casual
clothing and, instead of holding a HelloFresh or Parsleybox bag, was completely
empty-handed.
“I don’t understand why he doesn’t go inside. He’s heading
down the pavement at an ordinary pace—where could he possibly be going? I
should probably call the police just to let them know. I assume that’s against
the law.”
Yikes! Whatever next!!! Are we all to be murdered in our beds????!!!!
20:00 Lois and I sit down on the sofa and wind down for bed with another episode of Alexander Armstrong's new series on the history of Buckingham Palace.
It's fascinating to hear about life in the palace during World War II, when the palace was hit 16 times by German bombing raids.
some of the bomb damage at the Palace
The King and Queen, however, were determined to stay on there, and experience the war just like everybody else in London, with all its deprivations, limiting their food supplies to the rationed amounts etc.
And can I just say, this is exactly the kind of Royal Family that Lois and I appreciate having, and we wouldn't want them any other way, no doubt about that.
The King and Queen were still being served their dinners on the traditional silver salvers by the servants, but there wasn't much actual food on them, because of rationing. And they restricted the depth of their bathwater to 5 inches, just like everybody else.
And the central heating was turned off, so the Palace was freezing cold, especially in winter.
At night time all the hundreds of palace windows had to be covered with "blackout" curtains, so that the German bombers wouldn't see any lights when flying over London at night. And air-raid shelters were put in also, constructed in the palace cellars and reinforced by iron girders.
And palace staff kept lots of bottles of smelling-salts down there, in case anybody fainted, from anxiety, presumably, which was a good idea.
Various royal families from around Europe, which became German-occupied, ended up in London. And there were governments in exile, also, here. So lots of people to potentially trip over at night, that's for sure.
Lois and I often trip over things in the night, when we have to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, for instance, typically tripping either over each other, or over our floor-mounted top-of-bed-level electric fan.
And as far as we know, there aren't any foreign royals or government figures living here with us, and certainly we've never tripped over anything or anybody quite as famous as the King of Norway, I have to say. And long may that proud record continue haha!
flashback to 1940: King Haakon VII of Norway (right), and Crown Prince Olav
being driven to Buckingham Palace after Norway was invaded by the Nazis
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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