The strange things we say By Steve Way

 

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to learn a language using the ‘Michel Thomas Method’ – I’ve found it very useful – and one interesting comment he makes is that by learning another language you often learn more about your own. That also applies to teaching your own language. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching several Spanish and Latin American students English online for a few years now and it’s taught me things about my native language that I’d never considered – or been taught – before.

A few aspects of the language have always puzzled me, however. Even from a relatively young age it struck me as odd, when learning history to encounter statements such as, “Henry VIII built… such a such a place.” I couldn’t help imagining a portly bloke, wearing a round hat and a burgundy dress, shoving a wheelbarrow around a construction site. How absurd to say he built the darn place, lots of other folks did the hard graft. It always struck me as unfair that these workers didn’t get a mention. Actually, calling on my sketchy knowledge, (I was probably too busy imagining King H laying bricks than paying attention) I believe he demolished as many places as he built. (Though it wasn’t him doing the demolishing of course.)

Inevitably idioms are some of the particularly quirky aspects of any language. For a nation of animal lovers, we seem to have adopted some pretty gruesome examples, such as ‘flogging a dead horse’ and ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’*. However, what about some of the everyday phrases we take for granted?

“Do you need a lift? I could drop you off at the bridge…” (“Aaagh!” Splash!)

“I’m just off to pick up the kids…” (They get heavier every day.)

“Make yourself at home. Pull up a chair…” (Wouldn’t it be better to pull along a chair? I’ve already got my arms full, with all these kids of mine I’ve picked up…)

Maybe it’s because I attended a humble comprehensive** that I don’t particularly remember studying the use in English of the passive voice and conditionals. However, it seems most English language courses for students from abroad are obsessed by them. They often have to learn seemingly endless conjugations and tenses of the passive voice – frankly most of my students know these far better than I do, though it seems to me that the sentences they have then learned to construct through hours of arduous study are only likely to be used by the average person once a millennium.

They also expend a lot of mental effort grappling with the various permutations of the conditional form. In my ignorance I had no idea that sentences I used unthinkingly had terms attached to them, such as the First conditional for a likely event (“If it rains, you will get wet”) through to the Third conditional for a now impossible outcome (“If I’d actually done some work at university, I would have got a decent job afterwards”).

What I find most amusing about these terms for the conditionals is the existence of the so called Zero conditional, the statement of plain facts (“If you heat water, it will boil”). I can’t help imagining that at some time in the past at Make Up the Grammar Rules HQ someone dashed into the boardroom screaming hysterically, “They’ve discovered a conditional that’s simpler than the First Conditional… What are we going to do?” After the initial panic had subsided, interspersed perhaps with comments such as “Oh no!”, “This is awful” and perhaps appropriately, “If we don’t find a solution to this quandary, we will look foolish” and “If we had thought of this before, we wouldn’t have this problem now” perhaps they reluctantly had to name it the Zero conditional, relieved at least that no one managed to form an even simpler conditional form that would have had to be called the Minus One conditional.***

Another idiosyncrasy of language courses for those leaning English seems to be that certain words are – presumably inadvertently – not used. I often use articles from other sources and was – appropriately – astonished when it transpired that none of my otherwise highly advanced students had come across this word. Likewise with terms such as having flair or being gifted to describe someone showing talent, along with expressions such as “run of the mill” and “creating a stir”.

One concept many of my Spanish speaking students find difficult to comprehend is the idea and apparent attraction of spelling competitions. For Spanish speakers this would be a nonsense, like a football team playing against no opponents. This is because, unlike in English, each letter is only associated with one phoneme and each letter is sounded. (There are some exceptions of course but they are so few they would be soon learned.)

As you can imagine they are befuddled by words such as comfortable and favourable containing two adjacent silent letters. It’s been through working with my students that it’s dawned on me that you can only hear half of the letters in the word ‘height’ and since the second e in heightened is only lightly sounded (I believe the technical term is ‘Schwa”) that means only 55% of the word is expressed. The word acknowledged is an interesting oddity, given that the k in know is silent… but the c is sounded as a k!

Just one last little addition of which I am modestly proud. As is often the case my students (as well as previously GSCE students in the UK) ask me for guidance in correctly making a distinction when speaking between can and can’t. I don’t know if it’s help but I came up with this little ditty. “I can do the Can-Can but my aunt can’t”.

 

*Though presumably not the same cat.

**To be specific Dorcan Comprehensive in Swindon, which I was proud to attend and wish I could thank the largely excellent staff there for all gained from doing so.

***A good friend of ours, Seán Heaver, a former physics teacher told me when we were discussing this notion that a similar zero law of thermodynamics had to be devised when it was realised that a simpler law than those already assigned numbers existed.