Cerk Berks

The English language ever changes. “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.” And so the remnants of the language of my growing years remain, even as some would erase the past completely. In the absence of a universal authoritative grammar we were taught what our local elders and betters agreed on; and good old Auntie Beeb reinforced, in received pronunciation, that they were correct.

An extended ‘thee’ before a vowel, a short ‘the’ ahead of a consonant. ‘Different from’, not the grating and all too often heard, Americanised ‘different than’. And whatever the Oxford Dictionary insists ‘ise’ is still far easier on the eyes than ‘ize’ in almost every instance. But move on that finger does and as our non-consenting multicultural experiment continues, the language with which to adequately describe it becomes ‘enriched’ by the curiously perverse methods of removing punctuation, ignoring nuance and allowing a bland insouciance towards form.

On social media the noun ‘bias’ has now almost exclusively replaced the adjective ‘biased’ and the ‘bias BBC’ does nothing to stem the tide. Whether through laziness, simple ignorance or a desire to discourage nobody from expressing themselves, however illiterately, it has become harder to both read and hear what was once the most expressive and sophisticated language on the planet. Not everybody has abandoned it, of course, but those with the most influence appear to have decided that the onus is on the receiver, not those who deliver the words, to make sense of them.

But while the imprecise and sloppy use of words is annoying, what grates more than anything are the pronunciations which have crept in through a certain malaise, a certain timidity and a fear of offending. In particular, we seem to have lost an entire vowel sound. Southerners have long been unable to render the hard northern ‘U’ in written form, writing ‘oop north’ when anybody from the north knows exactly how to sound ‘up’ and ‘cup’ and ‘tup’. We find ‘oop’ quaint, a little patronising and oh, so southern and smile when we hear people ask us if we’d like a ‘cap’ of tea, or request that we keep to the parth and not walk on the grarse.

But, in words like bush and book and cook we used to have accord. I well remember as an undergraduate trying in vain to disguise my northern twang, worrying about how to say bush and ending up with an alarming ‘bersh’ which pleased nobody and attracted much and well-deserved ridicule. In attempting to conform I had instead shamed my origins and betrayed a lack of confidence that the world would accommodate me not as myself but as I thought others wanted me to be.

So it is with a mixture of amusement and dismay that I now regularly hear on the radio, on the telly and in real life, people talking incessantly about ‘cerking’. They sit in ‘rerms’ instead of rooms and discuss the reading of ‘berks’. Abandoning more nuanced superlatives, everybody is now simply ‘gerd’. I’m gerd, you gerd? Some of them even go online and enter chatrerms where they recommend cerk berks to each other. They need a blerdy gerd kick up the arse.

A cerk... reading a berk.

Control the language and you control discourse. Banning words because they may offend is one sign of this insidious practice, but another, perhaps more subtle manifestation is the fear of being strongly expressive in any way. The banal, universal vowel ‘er’ seems to be taking over and the effect is ugly and craven and needs to be resisted. Be proud of your guttural renditions and stand firm in the face of conformity. It’s only words, I know; it’s not the end of the world, but perhaps it’s the beginning of the end of something worth saving.

English. Don't let it die of ignorance

Every day we mangle our precious language. We use words we don’t understand, or use the wrong words to describe what we might not mean. Occasionally, hilarious clangers, such as ‘escape goat’, remind us how little care we take over verbal expression, or how reluctant we are to challenge received Norman Wisdom.

Other examples of misused phrases include ‘for all intensive purposes’, ‘play it by year’ and ‘that’s a mute point’. Add to the mix the proliferation of so-called management speak - meaningless pumped up expressions that allow corporate clones to miscommunicate with each other - and we are perilously close to little more than grunting… albeit in a form of English. 

If I ever hear utterly redundant phrases such as ‘going forward’, or tautology like ‘me, personally’ or the ridiculous ‘from the get go’ I know the speaker has nothing to say and will use too many words to say it. I’ve already closed my ears and pretty soon my eyelids will follow suit. I’ve been known to snore loudly in meetings and not miss a single important thing. 

We also use phrases from the past whose origins are lost. How can ‘now then’ mean ‘hello’, for instance? But, English changes; all languages change with common usage. Useful phrases from one age – ‘balls out, ‘big-wig’, ‘dyed in the wool’ – often survive with their meanings intact, while others die out altogether or change their meaning. I’m not against change; I’m against wrong. 

And the wrongest of wrongs must surely be the ubiquitous ‘should of/would of/could of/must of’ and any other variants you can think of. Wrong because it is simply incorrect; but even more wrong because users don’t seem to realise it. You hear it pronounced ‘of’ instead of have, which is bad enough but far too often you see it written down, even in newspapers and official documents. It’s only a matter of time before the OED lists it as acceptable. 

This is how propaganda works. Say it often enough and loud enough and eventually people will accept as true something which palpably isn’t. The Conservative political philosophy is as far from being evil as you can get, but Tory may as well be pronounced ‘Lucifer’ for many. Labour’s fiscal policies are demonstrably unworkable, unfair and destructive, yet somehow ‘welfare dependency’ is interpreted as caring. 

If you can’t even be bothered to check whether what you say means what you intended, what are the chances you’ll bother to check the provenance of the news of the day? Ignorance breeds more ignorance and eventually the truth is lost altogether. How else did the gigantic despotic experiments of the twentieth century get off the ground? 

The USA has just had its say and produced an outcome many disagree with and some even fear. But at least the USA IS one nation with no real threat to its identity. But a United States of Europe? English isn't just a language, it's a whole way of life. We should of got out when we had the chance...