Pub Talk and King&39;s English(2)

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God's patience and the King's English," and it rings true.

13 One could have expected that it would be about then that the phrase would be coined. After five centuries of growth, o1f tussling with the French of the Normans and the and at last absorbing it, the conquered in the end conquering the conqueror. English had come royally into its own.

14 There was a King's (or Queen' s) English to be proud of. The blew on it as on a dandelion , and its seeds multiplied, and floated to the ends of the earth. "The King's English" was no longer a form of what would now be regarded as racial discrimination.

15 Yet there had been something in the remark of the Australian. The phrase has always been used a little and even by the lower classes. One feels that even Mistress Quickly--a servant--is saying that Dr. Caius--her master--will lose his control and speak with the vigor of ordinary folk. If the King's English is "English as it should be spoken," the claim is often mocked by the underlings, when they say with a jeer "English as it should be spoke." The rebellion against a cultural dominance is still there.

16 There is always a great danger, as Carlyle put it, that "words will harden into things for us." Words are not themselves a reality, but only representations of it, and the King's English, like the Anglo-French of the Normans, is a class representation of reality. Perhaps it is worth trying to speak it, but it should not be laid down as an , and made immune to change from below.

17 I have an unending love affair with dictionaries-Auden once said that all a writer needs is a pen, plenty of paper and "the best dictionaries he can afford"--but I agree with the person who said that dictionaries are instruments of . The King's English is a model—a rich and instructive one--but it ought not to be an .

18 So we may return to my beginning. Even with the most educated and the most literate, the King's English slips and slides in conversation. There is no worse conversationalist than the one who punctuates his words as he speaks as if he were writing, or even who tries to use words as if he were composing a piece of prose for print. When E. M. Forster writes of " corridor of our age," we sit up at the vividness of the phrase, the force and even terror in the image. But if E. M. Forster sat in our living room and said, "We are all following each other down the sinister corridor of our age," we would be justified in asking him to leave.

19 Great authors are constantly being asked by foolish people to talk as they write. Other people may celebrate the lofty conversations in which the great minds are supposed to have

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indulged in the great salons of 18th century Paris, but one suspects that the great minds were gossiping and judging the quality of the food and the wine. Henault, then the great president of the First Chamber of the , complained bitterly of the "terrible sauces " at the salons of Mme. Deffand, and went on to observe that the only difference between her cook and the supreme chef, Brinvilliers , lay in their intentions.

20 The one place not to have dictionaries is in a sit ting room or at a dining table. Look the thing up the next morning, but not in the middle of the conversation. Other wise one will bind the conversation, one will not let it flow freely here and there. There would have been no conversation the other evening if we had been able to settle at one the meaning of "the King's English." We would never hay gone to Australia, or leaped back in time to the Norman Conquest.

21 And there would have been nothing to think about the next morning. Perhaps above all, one would not have been engaged by interest in the musketeer who raised the subject, wondering more about her. The bother about teaching how to talk is that they will probably try to talk sense and so ruin all conversation. (from The Washington Post (华盛顿邮报), May 6, 1979)

NOTES

1. Fairlie: Henry Fairlie (1924--) is a contributing editor to The New Republic as well as a contributor to other journals. He is author of: The Kennedy Promise ; The Life of Politics ; and The Spoiled Child of the Western World. 2. The Washington Post: an influential and highly respected U.S. newspaper with a national distribution 3. pub: contracted from "public house" ; in Great Britain a house licensed for the sale of alcoholic drinks

4. musketeers of Dumas: characters created by the French novelist, Alexandre Dumas (1802--1870) in his novel The Three

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Musketeers

5. Jupiter: referring perhaps to the planet Jupiter and the information about it gathered by a U.S. space probe

6. descendants of convicts: in 1788 a penal settlement was established at Botany Bay, Australia by Britain. British convicts, sentenced to long term imprisonment, were often transported to this penal settlement. Regular settlers arrived in Australia about 1829.

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