‘Snitzels’ and silly semantic snobbery

To be fair, we all have our little grammatical peccadilloes (euch, one of mine is the use of the word ‘Peccadillo’) or pet peeves about the way people use, or rather misuse, language to express themselves.

I found more than 55 different Facebook groups and pages alone for people who simply will not abide the various word misuses or misspellings of words in the English language. The first most commonly held prejudice appears to be against people who utilise the wrong form of ‘there’, ‘their’ or ‘they’re’. Following closely behind in second place seems to be the misuse of ‘it’s’ versus ‘its’, or in more general terms, a general intolerance for people who simply have no ability to correctly employ an apostrophe.

Interestingly, the most heavily populated Facebook language or grammar related group is without a doubt “I judge you when you use poor English”, a title which itself contains no fewer than four semantic insufficiencies, and ironically a group whose name belies the often poor language of its many members.

Although I can understand and even speak, to varying extents, several other languages, I am not sufficiently competent in any to truly know if this is an equally common phenomenon in other languages. I also wonder if this is a uniquely western problem, or at least more common in the west than east.

What seems simplest is to immediately lay blame at America as the precipitator of the English language’s steep demise. (Please note I am not referring to uses of slang or vulgar forms of English in general.. but we’ll get to that) While American English can certainly be grumbled at for removing letters such as the ‘U’ from words such as ‘colour’, ‘labour’, ‘flavour’, or the letter ‘I’ from ‘aluminium’, or exchanging the ‘S’ for a ‘Z’ in words such as ‘organise’ and ‘analyse’, this is a matter of style, and no grammatical change has been made by American English which threatens the actual structure of the language.

In fact if we remove ourselves from the usual American-bashing position, and look around, other more startling and dramatic changes have been made, mostly unconsciously, by a little island-nation comprised of convict-descendants and immigrants in the middle of the pacific ocean. (Wave guys!)

The word ‘orientate’, is my big one. And while I am still friends with people who use the word, it irks me no end that those who profess enormous disapproval of language abuse continue to insist on using the word themselves, despite it being grammatically nonsensical. (Yes, not a crime against humanity by any stretch, but certainly an annoyance.)

The verb ‘to orient’ comes from the Latin root ‘oriri’ meaning ‘rising’, which explains why ‘Orient’ also came to be used a name for Asia, ‘The east’, -which is where the sun rises. (Incidentally, ‘Occident’ means ‘setting’, as in ‘where the sun sets’, and is the name ‘The west’, in the same way as ‘Orient’ is for the east.) Initially ‘to orient oneself’ meant to adjust one’s bearings relative to the east.

‘To orientate oneself’ exists only as a backformation of the word ‘orientation’ a grammatically valid noun form of ‘orient’. Some have argued that since the word ‘orientate’ has been used since its back forming in1849 it is now essentially canonised and an acceptable part of the English language.

When it was formed seems immaterial. The question is whether it is acceptable as proper English. Its suffix of ‘-ate’ certainly seems to serve no additional grammatical function, and appears to be as silly, and then potentially and sadly valid  as back-forming the word ‘frustration’ into ‘frustratate’, or ‘conversation’ into ‘conversate’ (yikes, my spell-check is hating this article!), and certainly as unnecessary as the word ‘inflammable’ on top of the already existing ‘flammable’, whose silliness is further compounded by the fact that its appearance as being complete opposites rightfully confuses thousands of children and immigrants every day.

Again, it leaves me wondering whether or not other languages are as ridiculous as English, a language with words like ‘dismayed’ but not ‘mayed’, ‘disgruntled’, but not ‘gruntled’ (which by the way sounds substantially more unhappy than ‘disgruntled’), and of course ‘definite’ whose structure seems to suggest the opposite to what it means.

I am certainly far from a perfect user of English, or in fact, any language, and often create and make up words, conjugations, suffixes and prefixes to suit my own purposes, but I in no way suggest that these made up words are any form of proper English, especially since they are mostly created out of a need to amuse myself with grammatical silliness. Even if I wanted to, no amount of insistence would make it so any more than insisting that the deplorable Australian word ‘Snitzel’ is as acceptable as ‘Schnitzel’, just because it has been incorrectly said for a very long time by a lot of people. Or does it? Perhaps one day two hundred years from now a dictionary will exist which lists the word ‘Snitzel’ as an English word, spelt thusly (aaargggh!!!) derived from the German word ‘Schnitzel’.

But perhaps this is the organic nature not just of language, but especially of Australian English – a language forming observably over an inordinately short period due enormous numbers and diverse ethnicities of its immigrants.

I suppose that is how many words in many languages were formed, we spoke a language, took it with us to a new land and eventually aspects of the language and its contents were incorporated into the new language. We can call that bastardisation, or we can call that natural language evolution. We can see it as a tragic loss to the greatest feat of human civilization, or view it as the beauty of the fluidity of the ever winding, flowing and changing stream of language.

If we are to accept that all language is a living, breathing organism and subject to change at any time, are we therefore necessarily obligated to abandon all the ‘terms and conditions’ of language structure and accept all and any changes in pronunciation, grammar and spelling simply because of how widespread those changes have become?

‘S’s’ idea: Conduct an experiment. Start using a word and see if it catches on. If it does, it will inevitably become part of the English language and be published in the dictionary in coming years. Or at the very least come in to popular use (as has occurred with many pop culture words such as ‘nanu nanu’. Or several Douglas Adams ‘swears’.)

The first word I would like to start with is ‘inceive’. (euch, my spell check is literally seeing red) A back formation of ‘inception’ and a word which in my opinion has an infinitive structure and bears the meaning ‘to begin’. Unlike the word ‘orientate’, I believe that ‘inceive’ serves a grammatical function not served elsewhere in the language.

The second, also a verb is the term ‘envaginate’. If it sounds horrible, that’s most likely because it is, although it offends my ear much less than ‘orientate’. To provide a clear context, some friends and I recently spoke of a small man who is married to a rather dominating force of a woman, and her treatment and manipulation of him leaves little of his masculinity intact. To say that she has ‘emasculated’ him is not just an enormous understatement, but probably not even sufficient a description of what has been perpetrated against him and the role reversal she has created within their dynamic.

He has been very much ‘envaginated’.

Could we say the same for the English language?

Mubarak, “Let my people go!”

The Mesraya (Egyptian) people are an interesting bunch. Hospitable, warm and helpful. After many conversations and interviews with several men and women, to whom I professed to be ‘Christian’, not fancying my chances of popularity as a Jew, I was rather intrigued to find out several new revelations about them.

1. When they found out I was Australian, they professed total disgust at our own Sheikh Hilaly for his remarks against Jews, women and the west. They all remarked similarly that “he is from Mesr (Egypt), but he is not a good man, not like other Mesraya people, we do not want him back”
2. They are a very relaxed bunch, and are not interested in arguing. They seem to prefer to start the discussion out being right, so as to enjoy an agreeable discussion over a nice cup of tea.
3. A lot of them prefer to spend as little time talking as possible, mostly opting to keep their mouths over the end of a Shisha (water pipe), inhaling honey flavoured tobacco with friends and strangers while they share several rounds of backgammon. Little conversation is had and attempts to generate small-talk for its own sake usually fail.
4. Within the larger cities a new kind of apparent equality exists whereby women are permitted or even encouraged to work. Sadly this is for the purpose of enabling the men to spend their day time relaxing with their friends while the women work hard to provide for their families, predominantly by doing menial cleaning work.
5. Contrary to what I, and most of the western world, had been lead to believe, MOST women in Egypt have been and still are undergoing circumcision.  Two of the young women I spoke with about this were not circumcised and said that none of their peer group or extended families had any knowledge of this, due to fear of being killed. Yes, killed. One of them asked me why no western country has tried to intervene in this matter.
6. Of all the men and women I spoke with, travelled with and interviewed, none, but one, of them had ever been outside of Egypt’s borders, but what was far more intriguing was that none of them had ANY desire to do so. What seemed unanimous amongst them, was a sense of very deep ‘love’ and familial connection to a fatally flawed gem that cannot be saved.  The one girl who had before been outside Egypt’s borders was a unique case. She had spent several years living in the United States and felt Egypt pulling her back. Although she described Egypt as filthy, chauvinistic, and lacking in a sense of its own self-respect, she felt it held a powerful enigma which the USA simply did not have.

When I farewelled my new Egyptian friend in the Sinai, like an embarrassingly typical tourist I asked her, “So, do you think you’ll ever come visit Australia?” Her answer was simple. “No, I am sure your country is beautiful, but there is nowhere better than Egypt and I don’t really want to go anywhere”.

At that moment I felt the epiphany wash over me. I realised I had been staring into an abyss of national despair.

Here were a people living in the shadow of one of the richest cultures in human history and their cultural mojo had all but evaporated, leaving them in a sort of patriotic limbo.

Egypt is not a country plagued with terribly much internal racism or general discontent. What they do have, after years of living with their hands politically tied, unable to effect change, instead seems to be a rather unfortunate apathy. As a people they are almost saying “Meh, what can ya do.”’

My initial thought since leaving Egypt has been of likening Egyptians to victims of abuse, where they sit in quiet acceptance of their hopelessness. Then, as I am often want to do, my mind wanders to the biblical account of the Israelites in ‘slavery’ in Egypt.

This ‘slavery’ was supposed to have had a duration of several hundred years (roughly 200-300, depending on whom you ask). It would be prudent to point out that this ‘slavery’ would not have manifested in the Cecil B DeMille / Charlton Heston style, involving a total persecution and forced hard labour of ONLY Israelites, replete with whips and crying out all the while to the Lord for salvation.

Middle kingdom literature attests to whipping and hitting, unfortunately or fortunately, being part of Egyptian daily life. Even young Egyptian boys from noble households, training to be scribes, would be whipped and beaten while learning how to write hieroglyphics, as a simple method of ensuring they retained what they had learned.

The lower classes or individuals not of noble birth were given what we might view as the most difficult or menial, undesirable and degrading jobs in Egyptian society. This included, but was not limited to, working in fields, building temples and tombs and irrigating the Iretu (Nile). They were quite literally the working class. But the working class was comprised of a mix of nomadic tribes (including Israelites), Nubians, Cushites, Hittites and many others who had come from far and wide and become assimilated into multicultural Egyptian society and its various stratum over the course of several centuries. To believe that a working class would have called out to anyone for a redeemer would have required them to have possessed a significant amount of post-modern social self-awareness.  Additionally, we have no historical or biblical reason to believe that just as there were Israelites at the bottom of the social pyramid (pardon the pun) schlepping and building, that they weren’t also at the top, issuing edicts to build, gather, fight and worship. On the contrary Joseph’s being Royal Vizier of Egypt demonstrates the plausibility and even reality of this notion.

More accurately and more definitively, the ‘slavery’ seems to be that of an enslaved mind. In a similar way to those of the subsistence lifestyle of Russian peasantry in Czarist Russia of 1896. Before Marx’s ideas were widely disseminated by individuals such as Lenin, most would have viewed themselves and their lives as “just is”, without the benefit of objectivity and thus unable to see the terrible state of ‘slavery’ they were living in until they were informed of it. Again, crying out to be freed would have been difficult when they were viewing themselves subjectively from within.

Like in ancient Egypt the working class lifestyle and even its worsening would have happened extremely slowly over such a lengthy period of time that its noticeability would have been highly improbable. Apathy and acceptance of the status quo would have been more likely.  Even those educated few who were aware of their sub-standard social structure were not keen to revolt and felt that sleeping Czarist dogs were best left to lie. Russia’s former glory was but a foggy whisper in the falling snow outside the Kremlin. But then someone spoke up. Then another someone and then another. Until the revolutionary Bolshevik party came into being and coups d’états  were staged.  Even though the Russian workers and farmers were not literally being whipped into submission while dragging multi-tonne limestone blocks around, the political, economic and social injustice and impossibilities of their place in a damaged society meant that they, like the Israelites in Egypt, had been very much enslaved.

In Russia and ancient Egypt…things burned, people died, kings, Czars, Pharoahs and (now) Presidents sat firmly in their seats for months and years, refusing to budge for the sake of their people or in fact any reason.

And eventually the cry of ”Dayenu” (“Enough”) could be heard throughout the land, not as they called out to their dieties with apparently selective hearing for the umpteenth time, but as they called out from within themselves for the very first time as they took matters into their own hands and actively created the change they had been waiting for, without even realising, for hundreds of years.

As Red, in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ comments about Andy’s miraculous escape from prison after 20 long years, “That’s all it takes, really. Pressure and Time”

Eventually someone decides that it’s time to leave the Big Brother house.

In this case the Egyptian movement for Change, known as Kefaya (which means ‘enough’) have stormed their Bastille, initiated their own plagues, are waking their fellow Egyptians from their apathetic hibernation and are demanding of their Pharoah Mubarak  “Let my people go!”