Post & Mail


POST & MAIL

Further feedback
ET is very, very good indeed. It has
that rare quality not usually associated
with academic-style magazines - general
interest. It has the stamp of the relaxed
perfectionist.

o Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, editor-in-
chief, Chambers 20th Century Dictionary,
Edinburgh, Scotland

At last, my long and eagerly awaited
Issue No. 1 of English Today has
arrived and I hasten to let you know
how pleased I am with it. It appears to
be exactly what I have been waiting for
for years and I am only sorry that it has
come a bit late in the day for me,
having retired some years ago after a
life-time of teaching English to Arabs in
Cairo and Tripoli, Libya, when I could
well have done with such a magazine.

o I- Noel Treavett, Wimbledon,
England

Congratulations on a thought-provoking
and excellent first issue of English
Today. I liked it immensely.

o James Y Dayananda, Professor of
English, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

ET's interesting, ET fills a gap, keep
ET up!

o Dr R R K Hartmann, The Language
Centre, The University of Exeter,
England

Endangered languages
If the dominance of English (or indeed
other major languages) results in the
extinction of minority languages, should
it not be a matter for a new world
organization or national organizations to
ensure the survival of a linguistic
species as urgently as we secure the
survival of a plant or animal species? If
the Soviet Union seeks to impose
Russian on Uzbeks (as it does) or Italy
to impose Tuscan on Romagnoli or
Friulani (as it does), can we not - by
means more formal than the efforts of
interested individuals - seek to protect
the priceless linguistic and of course
literary heritage which each language
necessarily possesses as a characteristic
of its survival so far?

I believe that your magazine has a
duty to air this problem. While I was
Director of the National Library
Service of Indonesia in Jakarta, I
collected as a matter of urgency a
number of poems in regional languages
in my book Indonesian Traditional
Poetry. But I did this as an individual,
and the Government of Indonesia has
done nothing but bolster Bahasa
Indonesia. I should hate to think that
English Today will become a medium

for bolstering English at the expense of
the Celtic languages, and indeed all the
other languages now seen commercially
- and even in some cases culturally! -
as poor relations.

o Philip Ward, The Oleander Press,
Cambridge, England

This will not do!

Am I the only reader of ET old enough
to have been taught that there is a
difference in function between shall and
will, between should and would? At least
one of your contributors does not
accept that there is a difference; I
wonder whether he ever heard that
there was. That slur is, of course, rank
heresy: he is a professor of linguistic
science.

I am interested in your insert on
putative pronouns. Some fifty years ago
I tried to persuade John o' London's
Weekly that we might replace his or her,
he or she, her or him by using Us, lee, ler;
but, of course nothing came of it. What
we must not do, it seems to me, is to
accept the slovenliness of Jenny
Cheshire's first sentence: 'Anyone who
wants . . . must have their wits about
them.' As our teachers used to say,
'This will not do.' It is ungrammatical,
illogical, sloppy: quite unworthy of £ T .
Please don't allow it to happen again.

o John E Brown, Winscombe, Avon,
England

Oh yes it will!
I was delighted with the opening
sentence of Jenny Cheshire's 'A
Question of Masculine Bias'
(undoubtedly because it takes the same
approach I have used in a paper I've
been desultorily working on over the
past few years)! 'Aha!' I thought,
another rare voice speaking up for the
use of singular 'they.'

Unfortunately Cheshire drops the
ball and echoes the all-too-usual advice
of rewriting into the plural. And she
seems to condone the absolutely awful
usages of the combined pronoun (s/he)
and the alternate pronouns.

The simplest solution - and one that
a few logical textbook writers are
advocating - is the singular 'they' as
used in Cheshire's first sentence and as
used (as she points out) by most people
in speech and by many (Jane Austen
for one) in writing over the centuries.

If Cheshire in her otherwise excellent

Readers' letters are welcomed. ET policy is to
publish as representative and informative a selec-
tion as possible in each issue. Such correspond-
ence, however, may be subject to editorial
adaptation in order to make the most effective use
of both the letters and the space available.

coverage had only gone one bounce
further to speak out for his usage, she
would have given needed reinforcement
to those of us who are teaching our
students it's OK for them to write
'Everyone needs to be aware that their
language reflects their attitudes.'

o Ellen Tripp, Forsyth Technical
College, Winston-Salem, North
Carolina

A Way with Words

I am enjoying the Preview and First
Issue of English Today. The item, 'A
Way With Words', provided the 'lead'
for one of my best lessons of the term.
At least, I thought so!

o John Humphries, Bury St. Edmunds,
Suffolk, England

The article on Burgessisms in ETl is
very interesting. I have often been
tempted to do a bit of verbal inventing
myself. Everybody knows 'couth'. Is
there a case for 'biguous' as a term of
approbation for the increasingly rare
instances of non-ambiguous usage?
What about 'pessimum' as the opposite
of 'the best, taking into account many
conflicting factors'?

o E S Stockton, Sanday, Orkney

Videoprose
I am very impressed with the magazine
English Today. However, I believe that
there are two mistakes in 'Videoprose'
(ET2:20). The 'overlay' referred to is
probably a piece of plastic or card cut to fit
over the somewhat abnormal keyboard of
the Spectrum computer and inscribed
with the uses of the keys for a particular
game; this helps the player, since it is
sometimes difficult to remember the uses
of keys and takes too long to check the
instructions during a game. The abbrevi-
ation 'M/C means 'machine code'.

o David Harris, Northwich, Cheshire,
England

Rotwelsch and Inglish

Arising from the ABC of World English:
The earliest that I became aware of the
wider acceptance of the word 'Brit' was
in reports from the EEC. This might be
influenced by German 'ein Brit' [sic],
'die Briten'. I gess that the Irish hav
always used Brit, being a conservativ
peopl. When you com to discuss the
word Welsh you might like to mention
Rotwelsch - the criminal argot based on
Yiddish.

Something about Yiddish itself would
be interesting, comparing it with
Inglish. Yiddish came about as a

ENGLISH T O D A Y No. 3 - JULY 1985 3
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Semitic peopl first adopted Romance,
then High German and mixt the
language with Russian, Polish, Hebrew
and Aramaic. Inglish came about when
a Keltic peopl adopted Low German
and mixt it with French, Scandinavian,
Latin, Greek, Hindi, etc.

Also, I wonder whether Yiddish has
not influenced R.P. The broad 'a' in
R.P. 'glass', 'pass', etc. is characteristic
of Yiddish and was at one time
considered 'vulgar'. I suspect that it
passed from Yiddish into Cockney and
thence to R.P.

o Robert Craig, Weston-super-Mare,
Avon, England

Keeping ws bias to wself

Jenny Cheshire's article on masculine
bias in the language won the most
attention - and the most praise - of all
the features inETl.

Sandra Graham of New York found
it 'full of interesting observations',
including the point that newspapers will
tell us that Mrs Smith is a 'blonde,
shapely mother-of-three' but not that
Mr Jones is bronzed and muscular. 'I
was most intrigued,' she adds, 'to learn
from the biographical sketch that Ms.
Cheshire, the single woman author

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featured in your inaugural issue, was
married and had two children aged 12
and 9. Now please, without further
ado, give us similar information for
Richard Bailey, David Crystal, Tom
Me Arthur, and Derek Brewer!'

An impeccably organized request that
suggests ET's editorial style is
somewhat peccable. Appearances,
however, can be deceptive. David
Crystal's 'biodata' in the preview issue
told us that 'he is married with four
children', but another voice from New
York warned us at the time that
biographies like that were just too long
- so, to counter that criticism, we
shortened Professor Crystal's bio for
ET\. Comparably with Tom
McArthur's (although his data is/are
decently amended for this issue). As
regards other contributors, the'sketches
are written up from what they provide,
and it was Dr Cheshire herself who
provided the family background. None
of the other writers - for whatever
reasons - thought to do so.

Mr L Nyary of the North
Warwickshire College of Technology
was also doing some thinking - about
bias - when he wrote: 'I have just read
Dr J. Cheshire's article in your
magazine, and I feel prompted to
complain of the feminine bias of the
article itself. There are some languages,
my mother tongue Magyar being one,
where the third person singular " h e "
and "she" has one word o which
applies to both genders, and " m a n " or
"mankind" - translated as ember - is
generic too. However, the confusion
this creates is legion (another masculine
concept!), especially in legal circles.
Even students who might have occasion
to buy Rider Haggard's She (O) in
translation think the book is about a
man.

'I might add that an equal case could
be made complaining of the feminine
bias in English,' he adds, going on to
cite mother tongue, mother country, mother
earth, motherland, mother-of-pearl and
mother's son as examples. On the same
lines, Richard Matthews adds (from
Switzerland) widow/widower, nurse/male
nurse, housewife/househusband, midwife (!),
ladies and gentlemen and Mum and Dad
as all favouring the female, and
observes: 'M. Cheshire seems basically
to confuse sex with gender.' We did
not, however, receive many such
counter-attacks.

What we did receive, was a
surprising number of further pronoun
proposals. In the panel accompanying
the bias article we highlighted a variety
of neologistic genderless pronouns like
co and thonself (which also attracted a
lot of media attention). The proposed
pronouns had all been coined in North
America, but now we have some

4 ENGLISH TODAY No. 3 - JULY 1985
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400001152
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https://www.cambridge.org/core


balancing inventions from Britain:

• Ronald Gill of Derby wrote to say
that he had been 'engaged ceaselessly
for many years' in the quest for a new
pronoun - 'and believe I have done it!'
His choice is hey, which is 'they'
without the initial t, 'which has a sort
of logical aptness.' He has tried to
circulate hey, hey's and heyself in at least
two journals, but was neither printed
nor acknowledged.

• George Wardell of Reading suggests
mef, a combination of 'm' for male and
' f for female: 'As a person matures,
mef comes to understand mefself
better.' Alongside mef, he proposes that
'the proper study of humankind is
hume', and that telephones are better
'humed' by both women and men
rather than 'manned' by either.

• Don Manley of Oxford proposes the
'half-way sound' ze ('inventing words is
a fun game, so may I be allowed to
play?'). The object form would be zon,
possessive sons, reflexive zonself. 'There
is of course a serious side to all this,' he
adds, 'as your article rightly suggests. I
am in the business of editing school
textbooks. Woe betide if half the
children illustrated in the physics
experiments are not girls! I personally
hate the "he (or she)" and "she (or
he)" solutions; and "s/he" is horrible.
And if I add a note in the preface
saying that "he" means "he or she", an
angry female might tell me that I am
reducing half the population to a
footnote! There is no easy answer.'

It is easy to dismiss these neo-
pronouns as a joke, and the earnestness
with which they are often coined as
misguided. Dr John B Sykes, editor of
both the prestigious Concise Oxford
Dictionary and The Incorporated Linguist
(a journal for translators and other
linguists published in London), wrote
to us, enclosing 'a recent effort of my
own along these lines - which has met
with no response! It does puzzle me
that no one has managed to launch
some solution to this problem so
generally recognized as tedious.' In the
May issue of the magazine MENSA,
Dr Sykes proposed 'the single letter
"w" (pronounced as the vowel in "put"
or "good") for the subject case, "wm"
for the object case, "ws" . . . for the
possessive, and "wself" for the
reflexive/emphatic. This is at least
distinctive.'

It is; indeed, most of them are. Like
the other creators and adapters,
however, even someone as well placed
as Dr Sykes has met with little or no
response. ET has however responded
by bringing this fascinating, funny,
frustrating and yet serious matter out of
the closet for open discussion.

The English Empire

Dedicated to Rudyard Kipling and Gunga
Din, whose modem counterparts RK and
GD address each other as follows . . .

GD Your empire, when the Raj
Was its jewel, was so large
That the sun always shone upon a part
of i t -
Till August '47
When, shining down from heaven,
It saw the British break the very heart
of it.

RK We British as a race
Lost quite a lot of face
In Calcutta, Rawalpindi and Lahore;
But even when we'd gone
Our language carried on -
A phenomenon you utterly deplore.

GD Yes, the Briton was a rogue
Yet his language was in vogue:
What irony! A most annoying oddity!
Meanwhile, the British Isles
Were suddenly all smiles:
Your language was a saleable commodity!

RK So now I am a rajah
In an empire even larger,
Where my language keeps repelling all
marauders

And in true imperial style
Stirs up a lot of bile
By disregarding international borders.

GD This English Empire spread
Though the British one was dead,
And it's made a pretty profit, not a
doubt of it.
But in spite of what you've taught us
What good has English brought us?
I want to know what benefits come out
of it.

RK Well, there's ESP.
You want our electronic wizardry.
Though Science, like a vulture,
Should gut your very culture,
You'd love to have a VCR, like me!

CHORUS: MASSED VOICES OF
ELT IMPERIALISTS

Yes, it's E-L-T!
Learn English if you want to live like
me!
Though your mother tongues are dying
Can't you hear your children crying,
'It's a better tongue than ours appears
to be' . . . ?

o Gerry Abbott, Bamenda, Cameroon

A few ill-chosen words
My friend Azimuth is a precisian. He
pronounces the p in 'raspberry'. He
refers to peroxide, correctly, as
'hydrogen peroxide'. I can't go that far
with him. Still, . . .

'We used to play pingpong,' he said
recently, 'and shoot each other with
pistols. Now, alas, we play table tennis
and shoot each other with handguns.'

'If I had to be shot,' I said, 'I'd
rather be shot skillfully, with a
pistol, . . . "

'Or a revolver or an automatic,' he
said, . . .

" . . . than unskillfully, with a
handgun,' I said.

'Naturally,' he said. 'That's why we
arm our policemen with service
revolvers, not with service handguns.'

'And that,' I said, 'is why our
legislators find it hard to take anti-
handgun bills seriously.'

'Can you imagine,' he said, singing,
"Lay that handgun down, Babe,
Lay that handgun down!
Handgun-packin' Mamma,
Lay that handgun down!" . . . ?'
'But we haven't lost all our verve,' I

said. '"Table tennis" does sound rather
sedate, but we still play the game with
pingpong balls, because we know
intuitively that they have more bounce
than table tennis balls could.'

'That depends on who's playing,' he
said. 'The members of the White
House staff play table tennis with table
tennis balls. You know they do.'

'They could hardly do otherwise,' I
said. 'They speak in the Federal
monotone.'

'The what?'
'The Federal monotone. The tone of

an official spokesman telling the
reporters nothing.'

'Wrong. They don't talk to the
reporters. They access the media.'

'They impact them.'
'Right. They interface with them.'
'With it, you mean. The media is

singular. Like the data.'
'To read their prose, you'd think

they weren't much smarter than
educationists.'

'I know what you mean. For them
too the problem of education is how to
achieve excellence without actually
teaching the kids to read.'

'They opt for implementation of the
same methodology, too.'

'Which is . . . ?'
'To prioritize upgrading the students'

peer-group communication skills in the
affective domain and impact them to
goals-oriented behaviors through letting
them access experiential dynamics of
interaction in a hands-on learning
situation via optimal-maximal utilization
of equipment such as electronic table-
tennis modules for hand-eye
coordination anecsetra.'

o J Mitchell Morse, Emeritus Professor
of English, Temple University,
Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

ENGLISH TODAY No. 3 - JULY 1985 5
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400001152
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