My personal astrologer has warned me that with my Saturn in decline and my Pluto eclipsed by my moon influence, which is in a flat spin, I must avoid being ‘personal” in anything I say or write for the next few weeks.
With this in mind I will refer only to the rather inane comment made last week by a certain SAfm phone-in talk-show host who shall remain nameless. This gent’s daily broadcasts are not of my radio diet; in fact SABC radio as a whole has devolved into such a grey mish-mash it is best left alone. But driving into Cape Town last week, I had the car radio on and heard part of a phone-in ‘debate” on the subject of the SABC’s use of English.
A more apt phrase might be ‘the SABC’s abuse of English”. The callers were almost unanimous in their opinions. The SABC was failing in its duty, they said, by allowing its newsreaders, reporters and presenters to mutilate the most basic of grammatical and phonetic rules of English. No standards were being set or maintained.
The talk-show host was having none of this undemocratic Eurocentric nonsense and scrambled on to the battered soapbox he keeps in the studio. Whenever his sense of social generosity overwhelms him, he feels it incumbent upon himself to share his adjudications, counsel, analysis or recommendations to his grateful listeners. The subject can be anything from the Israeli fence to gay childbirth and he’ll get up there to tell everyone how to think properly. In this case he was eager to distribute his quaint opinion that ‘language follows people” and that it should never be the other way around.
He believed that ‘South African English” should be allowed to develop freely, unshackled by the irrelevant and obsolete dictates of grammarians and those who would impose inflexible rules as to its pronunciation. It seemed a bit of a pity he chose to mispronounce that one as ‘pronounciation” — perhaps he was just making a point.
The trouble with talk radio — certainly in the way the SABC’s hosts manage it — is that all opinion is under the strict control of the host or his producer. If they don’t like what the caller is saying they cut him off and move on to the next one. Granted, they need to be able to do this. Some who phone in are of the eccentric fringe, some just ramble. But as often as not, callers get dumped because they are doing their own dumping: on the opinions the host and his producer have decided are appropriate to the stipulations of their bosses. Radio and television propaganda is seldom left entirely in the hands of the news departments.
In this way the phone-in ‘debates” become rather pointless exercises: a series of brief sound bites, opening fragments of arguments, which need progression and development, but which are allowed no more than their introductions before they are cut off. ‘Thank you for that, Mike. And now let’s hear from Cynthia in Port Elizabeth.” The only exception to the SABC ‘dump-and-get-on-with-it” ruling is when some government flunky is a studio guest. In such cases the only dumping is of those who might phone in to disagree with the flunky. They get short shrift as the flunky takes over and is allowed to blather on without let or hindrance.
The phrase ‘language follows people” is no more than a kick-off to a discussion — had such a discussion been allowed to flourish in the radio programme in question. Unfortunately it was left at that and not much more. I would suggest that because there are many perils to any proposal that is so intrinsic and vital a function of the human spirit as language, that it shouldn’t be dismissed as not being in need of care and maintenance.
If I may be allowed the luxury of repeating myself: a few years back I wrote: ‘As George Steiner has observed, languages are infinitely complex living organisms, with powers of absorption and growth. But they can decay and they can die.
With the language is its people and these are inseparably concomitant. Neither can survive without the other. When you insult a language you vandalise its humanities too. It is for exactly this reason that fanagalo versions of black tongues are so despised. Crude mispronounced English is as an affront to those who respect its intimacies.”
The danger of promoting the notion that ‘language follows people” is obvious: those who would renounce the application of even the most basic formalities of language usage are, in effect, saying that the grammar, the subtleties and vocabulary of a language like English are a bit too difficult for the population to manage. Since in South Africa the vast majority of the population is composed of black people, I would ask the SAfm host whether he believes that black people should be assessed against some lower median than that reserved for whites; that black people should be encouraged to communicate in some shapeless patois, some sort of ‘boy’s English”.
Are these Verwoerdian echoes we hear?