Language

Have you noticed it? The slide towards faux-friendliness and fake sincerity from the companies with whom we used to have an impersonal and transactional relationship. The deal used to be simple: we paid them, they did things or provided stuff, thank you and goodbye. If something went awry, we told them and, with luck, they fixed it. Feelings, other than occasional frustration, did not come into it. But in recent years, presumably inspired by American corporate culture, companies are no longer content with worming their way into our wallets. Now they want to commandeer the emotional part of our brains as well. They’ve done their research into behavioural science and the psychology of retail. They have started to emote, to empathise, to understand and to ‘chat’.

‘Sleaze, sleaze, sleaze!’ exclaimed Sir Keir Starmer in Prime Minister’s Questions last week, hoping that a triple serving might stick. He meant to suggest financial corruption, though his language came from the hospitable semantic field that also corrals sexual meanings. The sexually dirty also overlaps constantly with the literally dirty. In 2013 Ukip’s Godfrey Bloom remarked that women who didn’t clean behind the fridge were ‘sluts’. This annoyed women who didn’t clean anywhere (but paid foreigners minimal rates to do it) and women who said that his was a sexual accusation.

‘Wizard,’ said William. ‘Super,’ said Ginger, in William and the Moon Rocket (1954). More recently we have had Alex Salmond, the leader of the new Alba party (a grand coalition embracing albinos, Albanians, albatrosses and Albigensians) declaring that it can achieve in Scotland ‘a supermajority for independence’. Is a supermajority even a thing? (This form of question, with thing, has been asked by the Americans since about the year 2000, according to the OED.) The Guardian has found evidence that the term supermajority is puzzling voters. How big is it? Does it have a legal effect? Again, it is America that came up with supermajority. In Congress, a two-thirds majority is needed to override a presidential veto.

A favourite piece of graffiti to spray on the Cenotaph or the plinth of Churchill’s nearby statue is ACAB. It stands for ‘All coppers are bastards’, though Americans substitute the word cops for coppers. In graffiti form it is sometimes rendered 1312, from the place of the letters in the alphabet. As a slogan, ACAB was taken up by Black Lives Matter. In an Independent comment piece, Victoria Gagliardo-Silver declared that ‘ACAB means every single police officer is complicit in a system that actively devalues the lives of people of colour’. It has come a long way from an uncontroversial statement among the criminal classes of my youth in the 1960s about their natural enemies. The phrase was always associated with song.

I haven’t yet read the report published by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. But, looking at the recommendations, I think there is one missing detail. We also need some loose agreement on terminology attuned to the conditions of British English as distinct from American English. Let me explain. I would not dare to pronounce on what is acceptable terminology in Spanish, for the simple reason that I do not speak the language and certainly don’t understand the context. Without context, you can’t fully understand meaning. So I truly do not know whether ‘negrito’ is offensive or, as many claim, a term of affection. Perhaps it can be both. Certainly Spanish uses far more physical epithets than we do.

‘This is the book that horses wish every equestrian would read,’ says the blurb for Sacred Spaces: Communion with the horse through science and spirit by Dr Susan Fay. It might sound like putting the cart before the horse to have equines deciding our reading list, but everyone wants a bit of space at the moment. ‘Thank you for giving us the space,’ said the Duchess of Sussex to Oprah Winfrey at the end of their ample airtime. This is not Star Trek’s ‘space, the final frontier’, nor yet the spatium verae paenitentiae, the time for repentance, that the Christian asks before death. Yet space is the prime thing now seen as sacred.

Universities have traditionally played an important role in preparing young people for a life outside academia. These days, though, it appears that many institutions are more interested in lecturing their academics than teaching students – especially when it comes to using the right kind of language. That perhaps explains why the University of Manchester released on Wednesday a new ‘Guide to inclusive language’ for its staff, made by its ‘equality, diversity and inclusion team’.

There is a kind of conversation which sounds intelligent, and which makes sense at first hearing, but which deeper thought reveals to be stupid. A classic example of this is the dinner party trope where some poncy polyglot belittles the British or Americans for being terrible at learning foreign languages. The raw facts seem to bear this out. But further consideration reveals a reason behind this discrepancy. Seen through the lens of time, it is much harder to learn a foreign language if your first language is English than if it isn’t. How so? Well let’s imagine how a Swede, say, might approach the issue: 1. ‘Do I need to learn another language?’ 2. ‘What language should I learn first?’ Easy answers. 1. ‘Yes’ and 2.