English is a glorious beguiling beast: take her as she is

“Surely the debate on English spelling misses the point – that it is precisely the spelling and use that make it a rich and diverse language, one that has evolved over many centuries.”

This is my reply to Duncan Niven’s apologetic support of English in all its ingloriously unphonetic, (and unapologetic) disentangled and misconstructed world of incongruous, laboriously linked letters, smashed sounds and universe of wildly worldly words, warts and all. And I chose this short reply to The Nation to give one of the freshman Literary Arts and Formal Communication classes I taught yesterday at one of the higher-tier Bangkok universities as an added bonus final listening and dictation extra-credit midterm test to divine their listening and dictation ability prior to graduating.

Most students did fairly well, but this was one I thought most amusing and would attempt to share.

“Shirley, the debt ate one English, spilling on Missus the pint. The hat is preciously this spilling and you see that Mark is sit Irish and drivers reverse language on that hat revolved offer man, he centaurs we?” Yes, they received full credit.

In my personal response to Niven’s short riposte on the subject of English’s spelling irregularities and literal lack of logic, thus emanating no doubt as it has, in flowering form, the most beguiling and bedevilled beast to bloom, as one of the world’s driest whilst loveliest, yet least uniform languages ever to step forth from the keepers of the Earth under the shadow of the sun and moon, and in summary, surmise as I may, for what I mean to say, is that English is that witch which she so surely is, and is as so clearly seen: a select species of famously female linguistic forms, both bright and tart, while ever sweet and smart, a pill bitter, meandering and melancholic, to both the eyes and ears, hearts and minds, of all learned men – the spry, the weak and whom is half-started as well as the fully stuttered alcoholic – joined by all those who are likewise generally befuddled… 

Beware you teachers of her cons and prose, for English will be both transposed of finally formed parts and fully formed starts, in that she bites like an adder and purrs like a kitten, strikes like a cobra, yet makes those thus twice shy, once bitten! 

Niels Jeffreys

Bangkok