'We Are So Lucky Having English'

“We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.” 

It’s fashionable in some quarters to distrust language, to be suspicious of its tricky, seductive ways. Personally, I like being seduced. I sleep soundly at night knowing the language I was born into is overflowing with synonyms. As native speakers it’s our job to gauge nuance and make the subtle distinctions, weighing sound and sense. I remember the time in 2006 when the Oxford English Dictionary logged its one-billionth word.

 

Consider the great gourmands (French!) of the language – Shakespeare, Browne, Joyce. Revel in Shakespeare’s linguistic cockiness, deploying some 31,534 different words in his plays and poems, more than six times the number used today by a typical, well-educated native speaker. He was so verbally spendthrift (Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII: “And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sigh,/That hurts by easing”), Shakespeare could afford to use some 14,376 words only once – more than appear in the entire King James Bible. The OED credits him with introducing roughly 3,000 words to the language – more than most of today’s college graduates will use in their entire life. One starts feeling patriotic about our native tongue.

 

The observation at the top is spoken by the late John Whitworth, the British poet who died in 2019 at age seventy-three. I wish I had come to his work earlier. He and R.S. Gwynn had good things to say about each other. His language is chewy and mouth-pleasing. Asked what poets he likes who have not influenced his work, Whitworth replies:

 

“Shakespeare. Browning. Wallace Stevens. Stevens is surprising. He surprises me, actually. Language, don’t you know. What language can do. We are so lucky having English. We might be stuck with French with a tiny Latinate vocabulary. Or Swedish, a language nobody else knows. English is like Ancient Greek, all the words, all those different ways of saying. . . . I used to teach English to foreigners and it is hard. We are lucky — English, Aussies, Americans, because it’s not hard for us. We’re ahead of the game.”

 

In Whitworth’s Gogolian-titled “Dead Souls,” published in First Things in 2014, he  writes:

 

“Alas poor ghosts, on whirring, westering wings,

Too late, too late--it cuts you like a knife--

Tedious in death as tedious in life,

They mourn the lost magnificence of things.”

 

His language is rich but not histrionically exotic. You might need to look up “westering,” though maybe not if you listen closely. Whitworth is an inveterately amusing poet, though his humor coexists with a linguistic grandeur, seldom overwritten, that recalls Shakespeare. The late Les Murray called Whitworth a “master of metrical whigmaleerie.” In his poems there’s a refusal to be sententious, which is not the same as not being serious. Here is Whitworth’s “Think of the Old,” published in the June 1990 issue of Encounter:

 

“Think of the old in their overfurnished rooms,

Nests of fretwork tables spelling disaster

To the teacups of occasional visitors,

Little lacquer mats and china cats, like the Egyptian tombs

With everything down to a toothbrush, as if

The afterlife were a long seaside visit.

So death is just another place to go

And the chalky body’s in training for a stiff.

To the young this is eerie. Their living spaces

Are all contingent. Anywhere I hang my hat

Is home. Possessions strewn, melamine bookshelves

Up on housebricks beckoning. A place is

For starting from. The old have had all that; they know

What happens to us is ourselves.”