MY?MOTHER USED?TO?DRILL into my head that it was my vocabulary that would give me a greater understanding of the world around me; help me to paint a picture of it in my memory.
My vocabulary would show, to boot, how learned I was – or, regrettably, was not – and could be of influence to those I befriended or came into regular contact with. My mother taught me also that I should listen to those “people who speak properly” – the kind who cared for the English language and felt compelled to nurture its nuances and protect it from marauding demons.
So, at Pine Primary I stuck close to Mr Cummins, Mr Griffith, Mr Prescod, Ms Blackman and Ms Inniss; and at Sunday School, Reverend O.C. Haynes, Mr Harper and Ms Elmo Taitt. And at Combermere it was Gladstone Holder, Charlie Best, Charlie Pilgrim, Livvy Greaves, Livvy Goring, Frank Collymore and C.deV. Moore. Then, there was no difficulty determining by their vocabulary how abundant was their knowledge.
These days, it is not always easy for me to assess someone’s learning by his or her vocabulary. Excursions into dialectal excesses, and picnics with green verbs are an addiction of even the tertiary educated and certified.
It is the compulsion in which they are trapped on account of their disdain for what they perceive as elitist language and their aversion to what seems colonial. Common popular culture language, à la black United States, creates this surround sound of verbal cacophony that is a comfort zone for many, but a Gehenna for the rest of us, who like the babies burnt outside Jerusalem before the deity Baal feel ourselves sacrificed to the god of aliteracy.
So many words are so often misused and abused in the speaking and writing of “educated” people, that their adaptation and imitation in the English language by the impressionable make for a new means of communication if not jarring imagery. Consider the following.
An angry letter writer submitted: “Barbadians are being treated like ponds in a political game of chess . . . .” I was stumped why she didn’t go for chest.
One politician criticized another of feeling she was “a king . . . in the geological psyche . . .”.
And we were exhorted to give Owen Arthur no shelter. Oh, that there was a “diluge”!
Then there was this braggart who went about his business “coolly, calmly and collectively”. And in his “collective wisdom” he determined that CARICOM’s response to Haiti had always been tipid.
And if a box was not enough, there was this Government minister who proffered that “decision makers . . . must think outside the block”. Which could lead you, as one nationalist would have us, to “dawn the shirt” of initiative.
It didn’t all engender laughter. In a most solemn moment, a well articulated voice on Quality 100.7 informed virtually grieving listeners that the “cortegg will leave . . .”.
And in almost equally sad circumstances, a commentator wrote: “The cynics may be forgiven if they remark, in frustration, de javu.”
Then there was this irate market seller expounding on upsetting circumstances to the Press, this vendor “who requested animosity”.
Some of you may ask of me why all the “holler ballou”. I enquired the same when it first crossed my eyes too!
Not knowing whether it was a compliment or an expression of pity, I nonetheless accepted the observation on the face of it. I was told mine was a “die-hard profession”; “very unique”.
I was taught that unique meant one of a kind, but more and more people have begun to believe it stands for unusual; and the Oxford Dictionary seems about to capitulate. Nothing can be comparatively unique, any more than my woman can be very pregnant.
By now it ought to be evident that for the likes of me communication has progressively become synonymous with exasperation. It ought to be clear, as a colleague of mine once argued, “even to a blind man on a trotting horse in the middle of a darkened room”.
• Ridley Greene is a Caribbean multi-award-winning journalist. Email ridleygreene@nationnews.com