Clutterbumph!

Shades of ‘My Fair Lady’ and ‘why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?’ Well anyone who knows will tell you that spoken English is a minefield that is well nigh impossible to navigate.

Written English is a snap and with a little practice, words can be made to trip breezily off the pen. All you need is a collection of esoteric words and phrases, culled from adventurous reading; Google them to find out the meanings and how they can be used, bung them into your sentences and, hey presto, you sound erudite! Thanks to the creative Americans, there is no shortage of new words and we have to thank them for the growing weight of our dictionaries, reverse dictionaries, thesauruses and mental baggage.

Spoken English, on the other hand, can strip off the mask, leaving you exposed. It’s everyone’s clutterbumph (love the word – thank you, Paul Gallico). Thanks to the fact that the English language is heavy on adoption, we have to negotiate words culled from every language of the globe, ancient and modern. Greek and Latin are not too bad, the Indian languages are phonetic and therefore pose no great problems (except for the British!), German is another happily phonetic tongue – spoken as she is written. But when you come to words derived from French, your troubles begin. Pronunciation is diametrically opposite to the way the word is spelt, and why on earth anyone would want to do that is a mystery. Spanish (‘j’ is pronounced as ‘h’ and ‘ll’ is pronounced as ‘y’!!) and Italian (actually, not too bad) add to the confusion. Throw in silent letters and words that are spelt similarly but pronounced differently (cough and bough are good examples), add to them the staples of pronunciation exercises (Worcester pronounced ‘wooster’ and brougham pronounced ‘broom’) and you will be caught up in an inextricable tangle. Despite investing in a pronunciation dictionary, spoken English still sends me into a tizzy.

The social interaction aspect also comes into play. How does one discourse with another whose pronunciation of common words differs radically? Shades of ‘I say tom(ah)to, you say tom(ay)to’!

Peter Piper, of tongue twister fame, will probably realise with chagrin, that it’s time to stop ‘picking pecks of pickled pepper’ and get with it if he wants to orate with sangfroid and chutzpah!