Pub Talk and King&39;s English

课外阅读

Pub Talk and the King' s English

Henry Fairlie

1 Conversation is the most sociable of all human activities. And it is an activity only of humans. However the ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not anything that deserves the name of conversation.

2 The charm of conversation is that it does not really start from anywhere, and no one has any idea where it will go as it or leaps and sparkles or just glows. The enemy of good conversation is the person who has "something to say." Conversation is not for making a point. Argument may often be a part of it, but the purpose of the argument is not to convince. There is no winning in conversation. In fact, the best conversationalists are those who are prepared to lose. Suddenly they see the moment for one of their best , but in a flash the conversation has moved on and the opportunity is lost. They are ready to let it go.

3 Perhaps it is because of my up-bringing in English pubs that I think bar conversation has a charm of its own. Bar friends are not deeply involved in each other's lives. They are companions, not intimates. The fact that their marriages may be on the rooks, or that their love affairs have been broken or even that they got out of bed on the wrong side is simply not a concern. They are like the musketeers of who, although they lived side by side with each other, did not ,each other's lives or the recesses of their thoughts and feelings.

4 It was on such an occasion the other evening, as the conversation moved desultorily here and there, from the most commonplace to thoughts of , without any focus and with no need for one, that suddenly the of conversation took place, and all at once there was a focus. I do not remember what made one of our companions say it--she clearly had not come into the bar to say it, it was not something that was pressing on her mind--but her remark fell quite naturally into the talk.

5 "Someone told me the Other day that the phrase, 'the King's English' was a term of criticism, that it means language which one should not properly use."

6 The glow of the conversation burst into flames. There were affirmations and protests and denials, and of course the promise, made in all such conversation, that we would look it up on the morning. That would settle it; but conversation does not need to be settled; it could still go ignorantly on.

7 It was an Australian who had given her such a definition of

课外阅读

"the King's English," which produced some ratherremarks about what one could expect from the descendants of . We had traveled in five minutes to Australia. Of course, there would be resistance to the King's English in such a society. There is always resistance in the lower classes to any attempt by an upper class to lay down rules for "English as it should be spoken."

8 Look at the language barrier between the Saxon churls and their conquerors. The conversation had swung from Australian convicts of the 19th century to the English peasants of the 12th century. Who was right, who was wrong, did not matter. The conversation was on wings.

9 Someone took one of the best-known of examples, which is still always worth the reconsidering. When we talk of meat on our tables we use French words; when we speak of the animals from which the meat comes we use Anglo-Saxon words. It is a pig in its ; it is pork (porc) on the table. They are cattle in the fields, but we sit down to beef (boeuf). Chickens become poultry (poulet), and a calf becomes veal (veau). Even if our menus were not wirtten in French out of snobbery, the English we used in them would still be Norman English. What all this tells us is of a deep class in the culture of England after the Norman conquest.

10 The Saxon peasants who tilled the land and reared the animals could not afford the meat, which went to Norman tables. The peasants were allowed to eat the rabbits that over their fields and, since that meat was cheap, the Norman lords of course turned up their noses at it. So rabbit is still rabbit on our tables, and not changed into some of lapin.

11 As we listen today to the arguments about bilingual education, we ought to think ourselves back into the shoes of the Saxon peasant. The new ruling class had built a cultural barrier against him by building their French against his own language. There must have been a great deal of cultural humiliation felt by the English when they revolted under Saxon leaders like Hereward the Wake. "The King's English"--if the term had existed then--had become French. And here in America now, 900 years later, we are still the heirs to it.

12 So the next morning, the conversation over, one looked it up. The phrase came into use some time in the 16th century. "Queen's English" is found in Nash's "Strange Newes of the Intercepting Certaine Letters" in 1593, and in 1602, Dekker wrote of someone, "thou clipst the Kinge's English." Is the phrase in Shakespeare? That would be the confirmation that it was in general use. He uses it once, when Mistress Quickly in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" says of her master coming home in a rage, "... here will be an old of

百度搜索“77cn”或“免费范文网”即可找到本站免费阅读全部范文。收藏本站方便下次阅读，免费范文网，提供经典小说实用文档Pub Talk and King&39;s English在线全文阅读。