Apr 3rd – All the people, so many people, and none of them can read or write; and that’s why we’re all, cult-urally impoverished.

Friend John’s English has developed a lot recently. I would describe his level, in terms of native speakers, as a pretentious idiot with ambition, who is unaware of quite how uneducated they are. That sounds unfair, but in his case, it’s a compliment.

He does that over-speaking thing – using too many adjectives and adverbs; the thing that gives the game away to the rest of us. He gets away with it, because he’s still got an eastern-European accent, so he just sounds like someone making progress in the acquisition of a new language. With an English accent, the same words would jar, and immediately give away the speaker as an uneducated parvenu, the type who make wince the very people they are trying to impress the moment they open their mouth.

I am trying to train him out of it, because, as his accent improves, these give-aways will halt his progress.

Do you know the lyrics to Blur’s first big song, Parklife? “I get up when I want, Except on Wednesdays, When I get rudely awakened by the dustmen.“

Rudely gives away the incompetence of the writer. Besides being an entirely redundant adverb, which has been shoe-horned into the line because he wants to use the phrase rudely awakened, it’s also wrong because the event he’s describing hasn’t happened yet. We might give him a pass, were he telling us about being rudely awakened that morning, but predicting that he’s going to be rudely awakened? Every week? That’s someone trying to use a nearly appropriate phrase in the wrong place, or, as we also say in this country, someone who’s not very good at English. If the writer wants to portray the narrator as an odd person who talks in flowery prose believing it to be high-brow, then what is wrong with routinely awakened, which is at least correct?

And awakened? Who wouldn’t say woken up? It’s a recurring event, ‘Except on Wednesdays, when I’m (usually) woken up by the dustmen.’ This, I tell John, goes to the very essence of the point – the revision, well expressed English; the original, someone trying too hard to illustrate that they have an adult’s vocabulary, by using a poorly-read teenager’s ability to use English well, to make the point.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XYzK2KGXwkk%3Fsi%3DjvvMFL_UijLEgQRp

I have put him on a course of watching every Guy Ritchie film. When I first watched them, I thought that Guy, or his scriptwriters, used this device to ridicule crims, who, having acquired the status of mega-rich, sought to speak like the educated and wealthy people with whom they now mixed. Like a running gag, to illustrate how, despite all their efforts, they would never fit in. I realise now, having seen them all, and currently watching the TV-serialisation of the film, The Gentleman, that it’s his house-style. They are not poking fun at the characters; it’s how he and his crew give voice to people they perceive as smart. And as bad as that is, it really clangs like a cracked bell when the writers choose the nearly-but-not-quite option from the list of googled-synonyms. Dear me.

Looking to the positive, Friend John has learnt himself some very choice badinage since embarking on the course, which sounds lovely in a native eastern-European cadence. It serves to buy us some time and space when needed. And I suppose, that’s what Damon Albarn and Guy Ritchie would say. It was only every supposed to be the sort of language to be used down the chip shop, to differentiate those who were trying, from those who couldn’t.