Inglis as she is spoked...

I was recently reading the blog of a (now very common type of) smart aleck who was lecturing the world about how English is such a wonderfully fluid and flexible language, how its real charm lies in the way users keep on modifying it 'creatively', and how those who insist on some standards are pitiable stick in the muds at best, and no better than racists or sexists at worst.

Now I have written about this tendency before – this inability to believe that there can be standards higher than one’s own, this innate inability to respect people who are better than oneself (which might persuade one to try and become slowly better at doing things; that’s the only way people can improve – whether it is at math or music or cooking or anything else), this pride in semi-literacy and justifying one’s incompetence at expressing oneself well with the argument that anything goes, after all, as long as one can somehow get one’s thoughts across (you can check previous posts here, such as Indlish, Job application goof-ups and many more). What does it matter if I write 'grass eats cow' instead of  'a cow eats grass', really (what does it matter if instead of eating off a clean plate I use one on which the cat has just relieved itself)?

The effect of this pernicious (and increasingly popular, naturally, in an age when anything that requires talent, mental discipline and sustained effort is anathema, an age when Mozart and Lady Gaga can be called musicians in the same breath) doctrine is that people expect to get away with anything at all. A student writing ‘Portia had a wonderful father who wanted to marry her even after his death’ expects so, the teacher who says ‘I have two daughters and both are girls’ does so, the restaurant manager who writes a sign saying ‘The water in this restaurant has been personally passed by the manager’ does so, the barman who warns in a notice that ‘Ladies are advised not to have children in the bar’ does so, the leave applicant at the office who writes ‘My wife is ill and I am the only husband at home’ does so, the tourist who exults over how cheap the ‘fooding’ is in the hotel he has found does so, the idiot who writes Jibananda Das when he means Jibanananda Das on his blog and does not notice the mistake in a whole year does so…I remember William Safire the famous American newspaper columnist sighing that there was a time when Americans could speak instead of snorting and grunting like cave-men and worse. And it is that breed of American (I know many who are better) who are spreading the virus of linguistic philistinism worldwide, among all those who identify the worst of everything American with ‘smartness’ and modernity (it's cool to wear shorts of the kind that keep half your backside open to public view...)

The fact that most ‘educated’ people these days are illiterate except when they are dealing with numbers, that most PhDs and MBAs would swoon if I gave them a comprehension exercise from P.G. Wodehouse, does not automatically give them a right to impose their illiteracy upon those who know better. And to those who claim that ‘everybody’ is doing it, my retort is that you don’t know everybody; try consorting with your betters rather than your peers. Finally, I am not  stuck in the days of Shakespeare or John Ruskin: even among the best and most successful  contemporary writers, grammar, spelling, syntax,  idiom and careful choice of words are just as sacrosanct as ever – as you could check out with J.K. Rowling, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King, John le Carre, John Grisham, or even Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Jhumpa Lahiri.

But that is, of course, only if you can do something as hard and ‘boring’ as reading books… I forget myself! Of course most educated people deal only with the likes of Chinamen selling umbrellas and electronic toys, and therefore need no more English than is required to compose blurbs on packaging cartons (ever read that kind of 'English'?)

And by the way, I direct the same sneer at all those Bengalis who cannot speak or write three successive whole sentences in chaste Bangla without lapsing into English or Hindi slang. In West Bengal, at least, that accounts for 998 ‘educated’ folks out of every thousand now. They say 'ami car-ta niye season flower shopping korte jachchhi', and are very proud of it. Anyways, they're absolutely awsum, lol! (OMG, wasn't that the coolest line I writed here, dude?)