From a youth at Saints, I was not the scholarly type. I hated homework, I hardly ever studied, and when I went to the British Council Library I wasn’t boning up on school subjects, I was reading Horatio Hornblower and the erotic stuff I could find nowhere else. In school, I was a lightweight in science and maths (there was too much regimentation there for me), but close to the top of the class in the two English subjects and French. 
Words always fascinated me, and I began to notice, at that early age, the powerful descriptions or evocation of emotion that words on a page could create, and also the small shades of difference in meaning one could get from choosing certain words – ‘continuous’ instead of ‘continual’; ‘infer’ instead of ‘imply’; ‘presently’ instead of ‘at present’, etc. Sure, one could argue that the differences were minor, very narrow shades of meaning that one would not frequently care about, but that was precisely the source of my attraction; on those occasions when the fine distinction was required, the person with a wide vocabulary would know the word or construction to achieve it.
I’m not preaching at you here – word choice is a subjective matter; I mention it only to explain my point in this column, which is that we have become rather careless about meanings in the words we choose; we’ve muddied up the language if you ask me. (I digress to agree that sometimes it goes the other way; today child behaviour specialists chide us that “children are not careless; they’re carefree”; a fine distinction perhaps, but still a distinction.) Where I’m going with all this is to wonder when did this awful mangling of the language begin? Was it always there and I, in my ignorance, didn’t notice it?
Just recently I’m noticing with the arrival of him as a hero in current West Indies cricket that the last name of the gentleman in question, that I know as ‘Braffit’, has suddenly become ‘Braithwaite’. When did this happen? Who propelled this? Are we so intent on turning our backs on the colonial days that we are now even having a second look at our pronunciations? Ironically, even as we’re doing the rejigging, the folks in St Lucia and Dominica are happily continuing to pronounce the ‘th’ as an ‘f’, so that ‘bath’ comes out ‘baf’, and ‘three’ comes out ‘free’. (Let me address the flak before it comes: yes, we have to be able to display competence in Standard English, I concede that. Let the critics also concede that we should be proud of our dialects as brilliant ways to communicate – for us.) I’m probably being a dinosaur on this but I am holding out for Carlos’ last name being pronounced as I knew it growing up, as if the ‘th’ was indeed an ‘f’. It’s odd, yes, but it’s more colourful; it creates something special; it’s a distinction that developed countries spend huge amounts of money to create; we have it, as the Trinis say, ‘jes so’.
However, the mangling does not show prejudice. It occurs everywhere, even among the speakers of Standard English where I see that ‘quality’ has become an adjective, so that the old obligation to determine the level has gone by the board. When did that disappear, and, more importantly, how did it come about? Was it just in the interest of brevity in speech? Very strange.
It could be that one factor is simply the drastic changes in the circumstance of our lives and those influences coming to bear. Remember how a Guyanese mother would say that she saw so and so in town and “She looked so good; nice and fat.” For babies, in particular, extra poundage was something to be admired, so that a chubby baby would draw raves wherever he/she went. “Girl, I was in town last week and I see Alice with she new baby. Well, girl, what a baby she have there – I mean so fat, you can’t believe how good she look.”
Conversely, someone who was on a diet, or lost weight for some reason, would then be described as “mawger” or “pull down” and people would stop your family on the road and tell them they’re concerned about you. In other words, if you lost weight something was wrong with you; they would tell you to go to the doctor for a checkup – “get him to give you some tablets”. When did that change? Nowadays, it’s when you become overweight that the “go get a checkup” advice comes up from your friends, because something is definitely wrong with you – when did that shift take place?
Standard English, as well, is affected, so that ‘short’ has been altered by some folks to ‘vertically challenged’ and I don’t hear any uproar from the linguists. Jerry goes in for a medical and they measure his height at 5′ 1″. Folks, that means Jerry is short. You can try to avoid the reality by introducing that other phrase, but in fact ‘vertically challenged’ is simply nonsense. The banna is short. Similarly ‘broke’ became ‘financially indisposed’, and ‘slackness’ or slack became ‘fun-loving.’
The expression ‘you know’, uttered every 10 words or so by persons speaking in various capacities, is a widespread development that seems quite acceptable to most folks, but it raises my hackles. Think about it; it is actually insulting. If, in every other sentence, the person is constantly interjecting “you know”, the message there is that he/she feels that you’re the village idiot and has to keep checking that you understand what’s being said. When did that annoying habit come about, and why do we embrace it so blindly? The first time that phrase was uttered, the person being spoken to should have said, “Look, I understand the English language; I am not a total jackass. Why do you keep asking me if I know? Cut that out.”
In the end of course, it’s subjective. Folks will speak as they please; my fulminations won’t change that. By the same token, so will I, so with apologies the cricketer’s family, “Sorry, folks. I hear the new pronunciations on television, but as far as I’m concerned, Carlos’ last name is Braffit.”
You’re not getting me to budge.
