RosieBell

Slipshods and pedants

Lovely piece by Martin Amis about his father, Kingsley Amis’s, posthumous book, The King’s English.  When he writes about language or about people close to him, Martin Amis is at his best.

The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.

Rather bluffly, perhaps, Kingsley draws up the battle lines as a conflict between Berks and Wankers:

Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops, and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

I don’t think that was an inspired coinage from K Amis.  M Amis comes up with a better one, “punks” and “fogeys”, as the identifiers of the slipshod and pedantic.  As for me, I’d just stick to “slipshods" and "pedants" - especially as both words are onomatopoeic in this context - you can slide and elide “slipshod” ("slusha") and “pedant” is a word you can really enunciate precisely.

I read The King’s English as I would a novel, just as when I was young I read Current English Usage, .and can happily browse through Fowler’s Modern English Usage.  They were just phasing out grammar when I went to school but they hadn’t got quite rid of Latin, so I picked up the idea that what we speak and write has a history and structure and that the words had particular names and functions.  I taught English at University level for a couple of terms to people a few years younger than I, and it was difficult to explain some of Chaucer’s use of words to students who didn’t know what a noun or verb was. 

I’m a wanker/fogey/pedant of course, unless I’m with those pseudo-pedants who go on about split infinitives and so on, when I turn into a super-pedant who has learned about the evolution of language.  I like understanding the difference between “masterful” and “masterly”.   I roll my eyes when I read my well educated colleagues’ emails about setting up a meeting for Mark and I, or Ruth and myself will be on this conference call.   The words “me” and “I” turning up with a partner throws them.

Martin Amis ends his piece with tenderness:-

Two months before he died, Kingsley had a heavy fall after a good lunch ("At my age," as he used to say, "lunch is dinner") and banged his head on a stone step. Thereafter, by degrees, he became a pitiable and painfully disconcerting madcap. He kept trying, he tried and he tried, but he couldn't write; he couldn't read, or be read to; and his speech was like a mixture of The Cat in the Hat and Finnegans Wake. Aged 73, he had just finished a book on the King's English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

Plans for Kingsley's memorial service were quite far advanced when the typescript of the present book (then hardly more than a family rumour) was delivered to my door. I picked it up with a trepidation that the first few pages briskly dispersed. Here it was again, my father's voice – funny, resilient, erudite, with touches of very delicate feeling (see the entries under Brave and Gender), and, throughout, sublimely articulate. In truth, The King's English contains more concentrated artistic thrust than any of the five novels that followed his masterpiece of 1986, The Old Devils. The reason for this is, I think, clear enough. Love of life, like all human talents, weakens with age. But love of language, in his case, never did begin to fade.

Forces of history

So leave the flat I own - and no man had to countersign my mortgage, as would have happened before the 1970s.  Thank you feminism.  Go to work where they can’t fire me without jumping through a lot of hoops - so here’s to you employment legislation and trade unions that pressed for it.  Hang out in the pub with male friends - there you go, changing social customs.  I’m grateful to  a good state school system for my education - my parents both left school at fourteen.  

So when this African immigrant chambermaid went to her employers and the New York police because, she says, a rich important white man had assaulted her, what forces lay behind that action.  The civil rights movement for black equality.  Rights of employment.  Feminist consciousness raising that put about the notion that a woman’s body is her own possession.  An idea that in the USA everyone, high or low, is supposed to be subject to the law.  Perhaps even the knowledge that Barrack Obama, president of the USA. is of recent immigrant stock (so recent, that his enemies insist he wasn’t born in the USA at all).

This makes people like Bernard-Henri Levy with his indignation that his superior friend, Strauss-Khan, should be treated like other people and Jean-François Kahn and his "Why all the fuss? It's merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help” seem to be from a very ancien regime - the age of chivalry, say, where you‘d parade your romantic devotion to a grand lady and then think nothing of raping a peasant.  To the tumbrils, both of them.

Update:-

One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until latterly, leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel housekeeper whom he allegedly assaulted was represented by a union.

The reason that this is an important part of the story is that it is likely that Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract. The vast majority of hotel workers in the United States, like most workers in the private sector, do not enjoy this protection.

Read the whole article and follow some of the links eg here:-

Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers union, Unite Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to report incidents to management or the police. Sometimes they fear that management, often embracing the motto “the customer is always right,” will believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may end up getting fired.

Ms. Babbington said a co-worker once encountered a naked guest who chased her around the room. “She was just panicking,” Ms. Babbington said. “She was very new in the country and she demanded to talk to the police. Her manager sat her down to calm her down and told her not to call the police, that it wouldn’t be good for the hotel.”

I do remember when I was young working as a waitress and customers thinking it was all right to stroke me, as if I was a pet cat.  I'm sorry I didn't spill their food all over them.

Prevailing Winds

It’s been quiet here as I’ve been on a cycling holiday, staying a few days in Saffron Walden in North Essex with a friend, then heading north through Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, ending up at Hull.  I had thought that by going south to north I would be helped by the prevailing south west wind, but the wind turned north east, which meant going head to head with it through the flat, treeless, unhedged farms of Lincolnshire, or being side-swiped along embankments above wide deep drains.  I’m used to a hilly landscape so this was novel - very fertile, and also very dry.  The skies were astonishingly blue and cloudless and sunny and the local news was full of the drought and fire warnings and the disaster this dry spring has been for crops.

I’m not going to do a travelogue, so here are some highlights:-

Pretty rolling countryside around Saffron Walden.  There’s a fine-meshed network of little roads and lanes in this area near Stansted Airport, and agreeable villages with English names like Starling Green, Little Green, Cutlers Green or Ugley Green.  The cow parsley,  hawthorn and horse chestnut and bluebells were blooming, and houses were hung with bunting and Union Jacks marking the Royal Wedding in cheerful patriotism (as compared to BNP style resentful nationalism).   Not many tourists - my friend who lives here says they land at Stansted Airport and head to London, so it’s nothing like as busy as the Cotswolds. 

On May Day we went to a village which was celebrating with  children dancing round a maypole, hula hooping, line dancing, belly dancing and a dogs’ obstacle course, which the dogs, ranging in size from King Charles spaniel to mastiff, couldn’t see the point of at all.  They barged through the hurdles or left the track altogether, and wouldn’t go through a nylon tunnel unless pushed in at one side and hauled at the other by their owners.  We sat in the sun drinking beer and eating burgers or home made cake and enjoyed the do, which was evidently organised by the lively village pub.  The barman played the concertina for the maypole dancing. 

 

The women’s toilet had a suffragette theme. 

Heading north of Cambridge I got on to Lode’s Way.  This is a brand new route - opened September 2010 - that takes you through the fens and round and over the great drains.  Very dramatic and wide-skied and watery. 

A long route - 70 miles - from Ely to Boston.  The National Cycle Network 1, in order to avoid the busy A roads, goes back and forth through this endless flat country.  A line of hedges in the distance seems like an oasis, a clump of trees - poplars mostly - like civilisation. I found it an exhausting push in the blasting north east wind, taking ages, fearing as my shadow got bigger and wobblier that I’d still be cycling in the dark.  But I got to Boston just before twilight and stayed there the next day to recover - no hardship as Boston is an interesting market town with a good church and heritage centre.

Boston to Lincoln - the genteelest thirty three odd miles of cycling path you ever saw, called the Water Rail, part old railway route and part road beside the River Witham.  It’s quite new, and is full of boards telling  you the local history of the river folk who once depended on ferries and barges.  There is also outdoor sculpture, which on cycle routes in my experience is usually big abstract things or huge pieces of disused industrial machinery.   Here they went in for representative so you get sheep and cows made out of old metal or a big wooden pike or pigs, which were attractive and fun. 

Also, by then the wind had turned south so I was blown along northwards under cloudy skies.

North of Lincoln it starts getting hilly again.  I went over the grand Humber Bridge and ended up at Hull, where I did a bit of the Philip Larkin trail.  He lived by Pearson Park for most of his time there, a Victorian park, with statues of worthies, strolling areas by flower beds and big playing fields.  Hull has plenty of cycle stands and is flat - Larkin himself used to cycle a lot there.  I’ve been reading his Letters to Monica and though no-one made mountains out of molehills more than he- the thought of looking for somewhere to live would hang over him like a trial for murder, and he announced his efforts at cooking like he had discovered DNA - he never made a fuss about getting a puncture or breaking down.   Perhaps he was lucky?  However, the sense I had of the city is that the centre is very hemmed in by ring roads and busy arterial roads.  I constantly found myself among fast moving traffic.  

Modern times

I went out one day to Holderness, the peninsula east of Hull along the Humber estuary, to Spurn where the houses are disappearing into the sea.  The roads out there are fairly quiet so I returned on the A1033. Approaching Hull, the A1033 turns into a motorway but there is a good cycle and walkway beside it.  I had just got on to that after cycling 68 miles and was looking forward to getting back to the city and eating fish and chips, when I let out a yell as I was suddenly thrown sideways, landing in a hedge.  I got to my feet and examined the cycle.  The seat post had sheared straight off, leaving a raw sharp stump of metal.  I was not seriously hurt, only mightily bruised on the leg that took the impact, but the bike was unridable, at least not by me since I can‘t ride standing up. 

However I was, as they say, lucky - I hadn’t been going fast downhill in traffic, hadn’t had an artery cut by the post or been impaled on it and only had a five mile walk beside a dual carriageway to get back to Hull.  So I started pushing the bike on this unprepossessing journey, past flyovers and endless terminals and docks with occasional sights of the origami tower - well I called it “Hull Cathedral” but it seems it’s “Holy Trinity Church”.  I got to the Hull railway station where a taxi took me and the cycle back to where I was staying.  I was near the end of my holiday, saddle sore and sick of cycling and although I could have got the bike repaired and carried on further north, I caught a train the next morning back to Edinburgh.  How many of my trips have ended with me pushing my damaged cycle out of Waverley Station to the cycle shop to get fixed and a new collection of bruises.

The following day I took the cycle to be repaired.  This kind of accident does happen, I was told, but with this new improved seat post with its better fitting to the seat (highly padded) it shouldn’t happen again.  Really, England is a fine place for cycling - you’re never too far from a pub, a guest house and a railway station.

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