Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of pieces, presenting the observations of Gabriel Lord Kalcheim. His topics will range from politics to language, literature to theatre, music to religion. His unbridled reviews of Tanglewood performances and of South Mountain concerts appeared in The Edge last summer and fall.
British and Americans, both of them, like to indulge in some startling illusions about how their cousins across the Atlantic use the English language, and particularly, though not exclusively, in regard to pronunciation. It is the feeling of most Americans that the British way of speaking is the embodiment of refined, and elegant speech. An American who attempts to use his/ her language with grace, clarity and gentleness, in both his enunciation of words, and his turn of phrase, is thought, if not to be British, then to have something distinctly British about him. As someone who had an embarrassing speech impediment as a small child and who valued grace and elegance as something laudable in itself, I strove to train myself, perhaps a bit artificially, in light of my ailment, to speak in a way that was clear, pleasing to the ear, and at the some time un-labored.
I am routinely mistaken for being British. All I can say, having just returned from Britain, is that I wish this were true, not because I wish I spoke more like the British of today, but because I wish the British at least tried to speak their language as I try and often fail to do, with grace, clarity, and precision. In truth they do not. Nor does it strike me that most British people, like most Americans, even try. We have to face the fact that the Queen’s English is dead. Nearly all of those public figures in Britain who are reputed to speak it, such as Prime Minister David Cameron, pronounce English in a way that is belabored and un-natural, and they usually don’t include much content in what they have to say either.
Surely there must be some historical truth to the idea that a refined way of speaking English used to be more greatly discernible in the Old World than in the new. Listening to any number of older clips from British television or newsreels will bear this out. Yet the idea that this singularly pleasing way of speaking English is any more embodied by the way most British people with supposedly posh credentials speak today, than do their American contemporaries, is farcical. What has happened? How has the British speech become so degraded? To be sure, the annihilation of fine English, among the educated classes in Britain, is symptomatic of a larger devastation of language, in personality, beauty, and precision, that followed swiftly upon the development of mass electronic media, and technology. But I think the descent has been in a sense worse in Britain than elsewhere, perhaps because of the loftier place from which her language has fallen.
What accounts for all this? In humility I must say that it is probably impossible to come to a definite conclusion as to its cause. But I believe that, in the case of Britain, a deep self-ashamedness and profound questioning of societal values, and of the noble, though often hollow ideals for which the British Empire supposedly stood, are the essential cause. Yet modern British people too often confound the mistaken ideals of imperialism with the high standard of culture and good breeding which was supposed to justify them. As things stand, they have justifiably dispensed with the one, and, in a leap of false logic, felt obliged to feel deeply ashamed of the other, even to the point of the entire disappearance of any pretention of grace and elegance from their midst.
In the public arena, the typical British person speaks very slowly, and, as a result, there is no problem of comprehension. But their pronunciation is so belabored that their supposed clarity of expression comes at the unnecessary expense of all beauty of expression. I sat in the gallery of the House of Commons while in London to hear the supposedly very cultured shadow secretary of state for education, Tristam Hunt, brutalize the speech laid out on the dispatch box in front of him with so many unnatural emphases it was obvious he was trying to distract our attention from how little he actually had to say. I recently watched a television interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, a good man who generally stands for the right thing, and hoped to hear something of the cultivated elocution and phraseology one would expect from someone whose job is to lift up our hearts with inspiring speeches, only to find that this old Etonian’s pronunciation was as belabored, his speech as devoid of content, as nearly all the rest.
When out of the public sphere the typical British upper-classman will usually take little care even to make what they say comprehensible, and then, in a feeling of charity, will over-pronounce a few words with as much distinctly un-American affectation as possible, as if that proved anything, to show that he really does have some class after all.
It would, however, be foolish to confine such an analysis to the degradation of English Speech. For society as a whole has long come to regard with contempt the notion that such things as grace and elegance, much less truth and beauty, have any value in themselves. One ought, first of all, to speak well, so that one can be easily understood. But who would not choose to pronounce his sentences as beautifully and effortlessly as he possibly can? To be sure, we should never wish to loose our interlocutor in meaningless circumlocutions without content. But in trying to be clear of all else, do we not risk becoming trivial and crude? The sad truth of the matter is that society no longer really cares about these questions. Beauty and grace, and elegance, on the one hand, and ugliness, crudeness and meanness, on the other, are concepts almost invariably seen as being out-of-date. Why should we bother to pronounce things beautifully, if we no longer care about beauty? Why should we care about doing anything well at all, if it does not thereby entail some specific material benefit or pleasure. Such is the zeitgeist of our age. The sorry state of our English is its unmistakable sign.
