Spare a thought if you will, for those recent immigrants to our country for whom English is not a first language.
Even high-school students who have spoken, written and read English all their lives have difficulty keeping up with the constantly evolving vocabulary and syntax of our blended compound of a language.
English is a “living language,” which means that the shifting sands of correct usage serve two purposes: To frustrate hard-core grammarians and to delight philologists who study our language and its vocabulary and structure in all its oral, written and historical glory.
The fact that English has rules at all is a mystery and a miracle, especially since as soon as a rule is firmly established and included in the curriculum of study about acceptable English, some notable writer has come along to make a hodgepodge of it.
High-school students learn not to begin a sentence with a conjunction, except that beginning a sentence with “And” was a trademark of William Faulkner’s literary style.
Run-on sentences are a definite no-no and are red-pencilled by most teachers of English, but Charles Dickens revelled in them. The opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times …”) holds the reader’s attention for 119 well-chosen words.
Double negatives? A sure sign of a new or linguistically challenged speaker in English, but for novelist Jane Austen, it was a way of imitating the speech habits of persons of a certain status in the English leisured class of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Double negatives are a sure sign of native speakers of French, Spanish and Russian who are struggling to become comfortable with English and its strange “dos” and “don’ts.”
Nor has English vocabulary stood still long enough for students and newcomers to become truly comfortable.
The introduction of new words into our language has always been common, with writers such as Lewis Carroll, who added “chortle,” “portmanteau” and “galumph.”
Shakespeare added too many words to list here, but “addiction,” “assassination,” “inaudible” and “swagger” are among those that have survived to common usage, according to Shakespearean scholars.
The Miriam-Webster Dictionary lists among its many new words for 2017 “photobomb,” “humblebrag,” “binge-watch” and “mumblecore” — if you are trying to keep up.
The Collins Scrabble Dictionary is another reliable source of words you don’t hear every day, but for Scrabble champion Craig Beevers, winner of the 2009 U.K. Scrabble championship, words such as “bumbazed” (which means bemused or befuddled) or “fanion” (a small flag) were etymological springboards that vaulted him to victory.
Beevers’ eclectic choice of words used in the three-round final included “oribi” and “zoeal.”
File those away for the next Scrabble session.
In fact, for Scrabble enthusiasts there is a computer program, appropriately called Zyzzyva (a small weevil — and a very unlikely word in Scrabble), which exists to help would-be champions learn the thousands of words allowed in competitions, all listed in the Collins Dictionary.
Scrabble words aside, when it came to vocabulary, Ernest Hemingway, one of the fathers of modern writing in the English language, always counselled simplicity.
“Eschew obfuscation” was his advice to aspiring writers: “Keep it simple and clear.”
Hemingway’s constant tussle with finding exactly the language he needed often resulted in no more than 400 to 600 words a day.
All of which brings us to writers such as Michael Wolff, author of the blazing bestseller Fire and Fury about U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House and the internecine conflicts that, according to Wolff, have set Trump’s presidency aflame.
In the first 60 pages of his book, Wolff, clearly a word enthusiast, has inexplicably included, as part of otherwise normal sentences, abstruse words such as “louche,” “revanchism,” “samizdat,” “auteur,” “leitmotif,” “myrmidons,” “hortatory,” “tummler” and “shambolic.”
For good measure, and who knows, perhaps for contrast to a president who seems vocabularily challenged, Wolff includes somewhat more familiar words such as “spasmodic,” “sanguine,” “existential” and “aphoristic.”
In describing Trump’s oratory, Wolff, sadly, missed out on a possible semantic home run by not including “epizeuxis,” a word more commonly used by literary critics, but in this case meaning the president’s habit of repeating a word or phrase several times for emphasis.
Newcomers to the language should console themselves with author and humourist Bill Bryson’s explanation of why English, its rules and vocabulary can be so difficult to master:
“Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools and English teacher.
