Ether Real

Few things are as hilarious as listening to British broadcasters from the 1950s and earlier (no choice here, we have a very old radio – authentic Dad Joke®). What counted back then as the only acceptable standard pronunciation for broadcasting – often referred to as "BBC English", or "RP" (received pronunciation) – now sounds incredibly artificial and painfully poshed-up; which it was, of course, especially when coming from those who had adopted it to replace an "unacceptable" regional accent. Here for, example, is Joan Bakewell, a native of Stockport who, like so many, permanently erased her Lancashire accent when she arrived at Cambridge in 1951. Note that this video dates from 1966, when things were supposed to have changed somewhat with regard to the acceptability in broadcasting of working-class and regional voices. Which they had, in principle, if you listen to this remarkable item. Women and Northerners? Good grief! Whatever next...

It's clear that in recent times the BBC has been promoting "diversity" in the accents to be heard on the radio, even on the flagship talk-radio station Radio 4, which can only be a good thing. But this policy can have a down-side, especially for those of us who were schooled at a very young age into abandoning certain speech patterns as ignorant. I have just about stopped wincing whenever I hear someone say "haitch", for example (as in the ill-fated "haitch ess two" rail-line). I have come to accept that it's a dialect marker of which some people are proud, and not the unmistakable sign of an unlettered know-nothing as I was brought up to understand, on pain of a tweaked ear. But things like "could of" and "somethink" still hit a tender spot – Oww, sorry, Miss! – although not as painfully as when, say, over-emphatic glottal stops are deployed showily and inappropriately by an academic or politician. I mean, why would anyone stick one into a word like "community", for example, as so often happens? To insist "that's just how I speak!" is the mark of a provocative inverted snob; it is also, I suspect, a giveaway of someone cosplaying as working class, which is doubly annoying.

What I find most perplexing, though, is when someone who is sufficiently "credentialled" to be invited onto the airwaves as a pundit fluffs a reasonably common word which they surely should have heard before, but clearly have only ever (mis)read. Not long ago, a woman reviewing a film on the Radio 4 arts programme Front Row referred to its "ether real" atmosphere. Say what? Are you serious? Then there was the guy who rendered "simulacrum" as "simmel-crum". Why, you pretentious, ill-informed twerp! Get off my radio!

I suppose I'm sensitive to these admittedly silly little things partly because of their association with tweaked ears and slapped legs (and, yes, those were still routine correctives in the primary classrooms of the 1950s and 60s: I'm sure they meant well...), but mainly because I can still recall every time I have similarly covered myself in embarrassment, mispronouncing some word or name I had only previously read in a book. Which reminds me of a post from a couple of years ago, on the subject of "shibboleths". Here it is again, if you didn't see it first time round, lightly revised:

You Shall Not Pass!

It's a funny old business, language, isn't it? It's amazing, really, the way the various grunting noises we can make have evolved into something so precise, and yet so elusive and changeable, when it comes to conveying real meaning in real life. As with, say, cars, the essential purpose of the thing remains constant, but the form it takes changes according to need, circumstance, fashion, and even accident. Anglo-Saxon never really recovered from its head-on collision with Norman French, for example, and you should have seen our little Skoda after the close encounter with a lorry we had recently. The sort of care and attention we pay both to our language and to our cars also varies enormously. My view of a few bumps and scrapes is pretty indulgent, and certainly not the same as that of our friendly garage owner, Luke, who managed to convey to me that he would be embarrassed to be seen driving around in anything in quite such a distressed condition. Although "distressed" as a way of saying "in a bit of a state" is not a word he would ever reach for, unless talking about jeans.

Of course, like anyone, I understand and can use a wide range of social "registers", and I am able easily to converge with Luke, and wouldn't think of saying "distressed" at the garage, either: "a bit of a fuckin' mess" does the job nicely, without causing anyone unnecessary awkwardness. But the fact that I might refer to the "um, passenger side?" of the car rather than the "near side" reveals me, nonetheless, as an outsider, fumbling for the right vocabulary. It's clear that I'm no more a mechanic than Luke is a librarian. Which is fine: this is an insider:outsider transaction. I'm happy to trust in and to pay him for his expertise, and he's happy to sort out for me whatever needs sorting out. But these little linguistic markers that distinguish insiders from outsiders interest me, particularly when they fall into the category referred to as a shibboleth.

Few people understand Biblical references these days. The original shibboleth was, in fact, the word "shibboleth" itself, as described in the Old Testament, Judges 12:

5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

In other words, the ability or inability to pronounce a word "correctly" – that is, as it falls from the tongue of an insider – is a quick and easy way to determine outsiders and then slaughter them ruthlessly, Bible-style, or at the very least to enjoy an inward smirk of superiority. Looking at the examples of shibboleths given in the Wikipedia entry, it seems the bloody Biblical option has more often than not been the consequence of even quite mild and perfectly comprehensible differences in pronunciation. "You say tomato, I say toma... Argh!"

The names of people, places, and foreign words are a particularly tricky set of silent intruder alarms to negotiate. I remember reading out an essay in a tutorial on Shakespeare's comedies – none of which I had ever seen acted on stage – where I pronounced the name of the character Jaques in As You Like It as "Jacques", in the French manner. My tutor tactfully let me know that the conventional pronunciation is, in fact, "JAY-kweez" or "Jakes". Well, who knew? Everybody on the inside, that's who; but come on in, lad, and shut the door behind you. Similarly, a friend who was studying politics mentioned the difficulty he was having getting hold of something called the "Grundle Gung", which sounded intriguingly Tolkien-esque to me. Of course, when he showed it written down, it turned out to be the single word "Grundlegung", German for "foundation" or "groundwork", and pronounced rather differently. I like to think my cruel laughter saved him from a deeper humiliation. Understandably, the ruthless slaughter of outsiders is frowned upon in university circles, not least because the whole idea is to turn outsiders into insiders, but the mortification of having revealed the true depth of one's ignorance can be quite wounding enough, especially when only realised later with humiliating hindsight (la honte de l'escalier, perhaps?).

Naturally, as with language in general, the insider's version of any shibboleth is really no more "correct" than the outsider's version: it's just that it's the only one that will get you across the river Jordan unscathed. It's no good insisting, "Look, mate, that is perfectly good Ephraimite!" when it is precisely your Ephraimitishness that is being tested. The difference between a shibboleth and simple pedantry about the "correct" pronunciation of a word is that pedantry gets you nowhere, whereas a shibboleth, like a secret handshake, opens doors.

When it comes to the pitfalls of pure linguistic pedantry, though, I have a good story which I'm sure I must have told before, but here it comes again.

Now, if you don't speak German you may not be aware that the vowel represented by the letter "a", when short, is pronounced rather like an English "u". Thus, for example, the surname "Mann" is pronounced "Munn" in German, and so the writer Thomas Mann is – in German, as it were – "Toe-muss Munn". However, to give foreign names their full native-language pronunciation when speaking English is both tedious and pretentious, and can have unintended consequences.

When I was in the sixth form, we were taught German by a brilliant but eccentric man, whose ability to turn on a sixpence from mischievous provocateur to outraged vengeful tyrant could be disturbing. You learned to read his mood quite closely. So one day, this man – a true pedant, one who habitually pronounced "questionnaire" as "kestionnaire" – decided we needed to know a little about the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. I think you can probably see where this is going. Few things are as painful as forcibly-suppressed mirth, so you can well imagine the agonies of seven 17-year-old boys, all trying not to catch each other's eye as their teacher solemnly expounded the philosophy of a man whose name, in his fusspot rendering, now rhymed with "blunt". I never knew whether this was a deliberate provocation on his part to make us squirm – I wouldn't have put it past him – but it makes me ache with laughter to this day whenever I recall it, and is also a useful lesson in the perils of misplaced pedantry; a self-inflicted anti-shibboleth, a vice that puts you in a category of unwelcome outsiders alongside bores, egomaniacs, anecdotards, and compulsive practical jokers. You shall not pass!