I always feel I’m succeeding as a columnist when I cast a fly on to a serene academic paralysis and cause some famished intellectual to rise up from the pedagogic murk.
Last week I had two undersized cockfish snatch at my barbless Olive Nymph, both spitting off twitchy letters of protest to this paper. It’s considered poor journalistic form to come back at one’s accusers, to seek the last word, but certainly in the case of Lawrence Berman of Unisa’s English department, the issue is of sufficient importance not to be left hanging.
Berman was most commendable in the way he stuck up for two of his colleagues, co-authoresses of the latest in the popular Oxford University Press “English For Dummies” series, this one called English in Perspective. It’s comforting to know that chivalry still survives, however flimsily, in today’s academic groves.
Traditionally these are settings for the most venomous of jealousies and gall — ask former vice-chancellor of Wits, Norma Reid Birley, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless head of council.
Getting the facts all agley is, of course, almost obligatory in academic discourse. Berman demonstrated this in the very first sentence of his letter. In fact it was I who was accused by the authoresses of being “prescriptive”, not the other way around. (I believe I just called them feeble-minded.) This because nearly four years ago I wrote that the SABC was failing in its duty to provide examples of passable English usage instead of the crude embarrassments that constitute much of its news bulletins.
Clearly my comments jangled on in the minds of lecturers Felicity Horne and Glenda Heinemann, who waited patiently for four years to dump on me for being “prescriptive”. They dismissed my “attitude” as “judgemental”, saying that the imposition of “value judgements” was a way of applying “status” to language. “Descriptive” rule-free expression was preferable, more “liberating”.
In support of this limp baloney Berman described my analogy about piano playing needing more than a fists-on-keyboard method as “threadbare”, replacing it with his own analogy: soccer. As it turns out, his one works even better and I must thank Lawrence for proving my point in more fittingly dumbed-down terms. He says the soccer played in Leeds is vastly different to the soccer played in Madrid, according the variation to “indigenous innovations”. What Lawrence forgets to mention is that wherever soccer is played it conforms to the same basic disciplines. The fields are of exactly the same measurements, the offside and many other laws are enforced by referees and line judges, the number of players is fixed, games are played within the same time limits.
It is within these set and rigidly imposed disciplines that “indigenous innovations” flourish. Without them the game would be a free-for-all of no value except to the level of mentalities that enjoy television wrestling. Or as Bafana Bafana so energetically demonstrated last week, a game where fouls are party to strategy. And didn’t they just trounce the English in that department?
All language needs structure or else it becomes a formless mess. What the Unisa hens do in their book is more than suggest; they actually recommend that the most basic of English rudiments be abandoned in favour of some slipshod “descriptive” approach to language use. I hope all this explanation hasn’t been too complicated for Lawrence to follow.
Now, on to another indignant academic in the shape of Dr James Cambray of the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. Jim is to the “alien trout and bass” lobby what Roberto Giraldo is to HIV/Aids: a gold-brick dissident. His letter last week read like the who’s who of biodiversity: The Global Invasive Species Programme and the Scientific Committee and … talk about name-dropping.
What Jimbo doesn’t like acknowledging is reality. Trout and bass are here to stay, they’re ineradicable. The former species has been here for more than a century and what needs to be done is not to sulk about what dreadful harm some claim they are wreaking on our freshwater habitats, but get on with finding out how to manage them. The same sensible logic is applied to other exotics like vines, fruit trees, wheat and even 1820 settler stock, which has been here much longer than trout. There’s plenty of proof of that latter alien species surrounding Jimbo in his museum.
In fact, the advent of trout in South Africa and elsewhere has usually had a positive effect on the environment, something that the dissidents hate to admit. Fly-fishermen were the first to introduce what the Cambray set now call the “conservation ethic”, and they continue to do so.
Last thought this week, on that magnificent “organogram” of the human female reproductive system issued by the Eastern Cape Department of Health. Even Berman couldn’t call it a threadbare metaphor for the provincial administrative structures.
The diagram doesn’t get around to showing what role in the administration is represented by the clitoris. My old friend, Tom S, said surely it must be Sport and Recreation.
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