Mind Your Language!

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE!

This is a new site, full of hope and trepidation! What you can expect to see at this site are the issues and snafus that attend communication between people in the USA.

This blog is a commentary on those peculiarities of the American usage of the English language, reflecting a highly popular tendency to blaze one’s own trail, right or wrong. Americans call their most popular game “football,” when it is almost never played with the foot (and with utter disregard for the billions of people the world over who play their football with the foot). They ride to the moon and beyond in spacecraft that still measure quantities in “bushels,” “inches,” and “pounds,” with implicit disdain for the rest of humanity who have coalesced completely around metric mensuration for generations now. But most notable Americanisms occur in communication: such as the blustery assertion, “I don’t want no nothin’ from nobody.”

During my third year in the USA, a colleague in grad school said something that gave me pause. He had asked what time of year I first arrived in the USA. To show off my two-year acculturation into US English I replied, “Fer-byu-wary.” The colleague smiled ruefully and said: “Most of you Africans come here speaking proper English, but then slide into the casual American way of saying things.” I smiled, and corrected myself, “Fe-bru-ary.”

He was right, of course. But the urge to conform to Americanisms is very strong among immigrants. As the saying goes, “You have to go along in order to get along.” So, before long some of us from Anglophone West Africa begin to babble in the American way. We learn to make popular mistakes like the following (the underlined words are redundant or incorrect):

“Thanks, ya-all.”

“We drug the couch across the room.”

“Get off of me.”

“She brung lunch.”

“He’s not that tall of a man.”

“Where’s he at?” (“Where” means “at what place”; thus, repeating “at” amounts to tautology.)

Does all this matter? Well, it depends. It may not be “that big of a deal” when we are engaged in vocal conversation. But in written communication one is likely to be misunderstood by wrong words or phrases. Conversation, after all, is often clarified by being augmented with other, non-verbal cues—body language gestures like nods and smiles—especially when one is addressing peers who share his vernacular. A mother who admonishes her son, “Don’t tell no lies to nobody!” is unlikely to be misunderstood. But when you communicate in writing, your audience has nothing but your exact words to tell them what you mean. That is why the rules of grammar and syntax are in place for “formal” (i.e. written) English. That is the area that concerns us in this blog.

The American gusto for improvisation fosters innovation, yes; but also quite often it leaves you scratching your head. Please come in! You can scratch my head and I will scratch yours, OK?