A Week Without Borrowings

Notes Toward a Native Tongue,

By Sir Timothy Monday, Bt., sometime Master of Words in a windy Cumbrian school.

It was in a fit of pedagogical mischief—of the sort that improves the spirits while endangering the timetable—that I once set my pupils a challenge: for the span of one week, they were to speak, at appointed times and within appointed bounds, only in what I termed Anglish.

By Anglish, I meant—loosely, provocatively, and with just enough cruelty to make it memorable— a playful term rooted, as one might expect, in Anglo-Saxon; an English pared back, so far as youthful vigilance might allow, from its Latin, French, and other borrowings. Not a historical reconstruction (Heaven forbid), but a game of constraint—half sport, half experiment, and, if properly entered into, a kind of verbal fencing in which the bluntest word might, in the right hand, prove the sharpest.

To make the thing tempting (for boys and girls will endure almost anything if it promises delight), I framed it not as deprivation but as license of another kind. "You are not losing words," I told them, "you are regaining others—older, shorter, stranger, and often more exact." A question becomes an ask; an answer, if one must avoid reply, may be a give-back or even a saying-again; a conversation is merely a talk; impossible yields to unworkable; important becomes weighty; example, a case.

More alluring still was the right—indeed, the expectation—to forge words where none came readily to hand. English, I reminded them, is not a relic under glass but a workshop in constant use. If dictionary offended, one might reach for word-hoard; if library, then book-room; if telephone, why not far-speaker? The room brightened perceptibly at this last liberty. There is in the young a natural appetite for invention, which schooling too often disciplines into silence. Here, for once, invention was the rule.

Kennings, I added—at which several brows furrowed—were not merely permitted but particularly welcome. These, I explained, were the old poetic compounds of the early Germanic tongues, most famously preserved in works such as Beowulf: vivid, often metaphorical pairings by which a thing is described rather than named. Thus the sea becomes the whale-road, the body the bone-house, the sun a sky-candle. They belong to a time when language delighted not only in precision but in indirection, when naming a thing outright was considered almost a failure of imagination.

The room brightened perceptibly at this license. There is in the young a natural appetite for invention, which schooling too often disciplines into silence. Here, for once, invention was not merely allowed but rewarded; and soon enough, the air filled with brave, if occasionally monstrous, coinages—some ungainly, some ingenious, and a few, to my quiet satisfaction, worthy of the old poets themselves.

I made a small ceremony of unveiling the forbidden list: a handful of words so common that to avoid them would require not scholarship but attention—important, question, answer, continue, decide, difficult, example, and their companions. Alongside, I set a modest word-hoard of allowed stand-ins. "You will fail," I told them cheerfully. "But you will fail in interesting ways."

Now, I am not wholly without mercy. I did not demand this at all hours (which would have reduced the school to silence by Tuesday), nor did I require from them any prior knowledge of etymology (which would have reduced it sooner). Instead, the contest was confined to our English grammar lessons and to certain declared intervals, during which the rules held sway with theatrical severity. Outside those bounds, they might relapse into their usual mongrel ease.

Infractions did not result in expulsion from the game. That would have been too swift, and far less instructive. Instead, each lapse incurred a point—a small, accumulating debit against one's linguistic virtue. The week thus became not a matter of survival, but of balance. Some ran up debts with alarming rapidity; others husbanded their speech like misers. A few attempted, with varying success, to argue their way out of penalties, appealing to naturalisation, ambiguity, or sheer desperation. I heard, before Wednesday, more impromptu philology than most undergraduates manage in a term.

There was, for instance, young Harcourt, who prepared with commendable zeal a pocket-book of approved words. He flourished for nearly two days, until, in a moment of triumph, he declared the exercise "a great success," whereupon he incurred so many points at once that his moral collapse was instantaneous. His outrage was philosophical: "But, sir, what else could I say?" To which I replied, "Good outcome, Mr Harcourt, though in your case a poor one."

Another, a girl of formidable will but uncertain ear, attempted to evade the law by periphrasis. Deprived of history, she spoke of the "tale of what has been"; bereft of grammar, she invoked "knowledge of the world's workings." This last I allowed, not because it was pure (it was not), but because it was beautiful, and beauty has always been the one argument I am willing to hear against rules I have just made.

Amid this cheerful reckoning stood Miss Eleanor Wetherby. She did not so much avoid the forbidden as render it unnecessary. Where others stumbled into gaps, she laid planks. Where others reached for a barred word, she had already found its elder cousin.

Most remarkably, her tally remained—through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and the greater part of Thursday—at a perfect zero.

It was at this point that I began, in idle fancy, to wonder where she might be from. One is tempted, in such cases, to imagine some remote valley—perhaps in our own Cumbria—where the speech runs clear of later accretions, and where the older Germanic stock has been husbanded like a well-kept orchard. Or one drifts north and east, to those parts of England where Norse once pressed hard upon English, leaving behind a tongue somewhat shorter in stride, firmer in tread, and less given to Latinate flourish.

Yet the longer I watched her, the less I believed in any such geographical romance. There is, in truth, no place where English grew in splendid isolation; even in its earliest forms it was already a mingled thing, and after the upheavals surrounding the Norman Conquest, it became gloriously, irretrievably so. Nor, I reluctantly conceded, is such skill written in the blood. What Miss Wetherby possessed was not inheritance but attention: an ear for roots, a delight in structure, a willingness to submit to constraint without becoming its victim. In short, she came not from a place, but from a habit of mind.

Her single lapse came, as such things often do, at the height of her mastery. On  Thursday, in the course of her closing talk, she referred—lightly, almost playfully—to the "very shape of the thought." I paused, pen in hand, and the room paused with me. Very—that most treacherous of small words. It passed unnoticed by most of her fellows, but not, I think, by her. She glanced, just perceptibly, in my direction.

What made the moment the more remarkable was this: very, for all its commonness—indeed, because of it—had not been uttered once, by anyone, throughout the entire week. The word had been so thoroughly shunned, so instinctively avoided, that its sudden appearance fell upon us with the force of an intruder at a well-guarded gate. That it should be Miss Wetherby, of all speakers, who admitted it, lent the lapse a quality almost theatrical—less a failure than a perfectly timed imperfection.

Now, the curiosity of the error lay in this: while very is commonly traced through French (verai, vrai), it had, by that time, so thoroughly naturalised itself in English usage, and so shifted in meaning, that one might argue—if one were inclined to generosity—that it had become, in spirit if not in pedigree, an English word. Was I to penalise her for a borrowing so ancient, so worn into the grain of the language, that its foreignness had become almost theoretical?

I did. One must have rules, if only to enjoy bending them in retrospect.

Thus she ended the week not at zero, but at one—a score which, in any reasonable system of morality, must be taken as perfection wearing a human face.

On Friday, when the survivors were required to give short talks (for presentations were, of course, proscribed), Miss Wetherby rose and delivered, without further lapse, an account of the week itself. She spoke of word-hoards and speech-craft, of tongue-law and meaning-shifts, of how a language, when denied its imports, discovers its own mines. There was wit, too—dry, exact, and merciless. When she concluded, even the heavily indebted applauded, though one suspects they applauded as much their own release as her triumph.

It was at this juncture—when the exercise had run its course, and the room stood in that pleasant hush which follows a shared exertion—that I found myself obliged to produce what the boys had, all week, pretended not to desire: a prize.

Outwardly, it was a modest thing. A finely bound little volume of Beowulf, set in facing-page translation, its dark green cloth stamped with a restrained gold. Within, on the flyleaf, I had written:

For mastery not of words, but of their temper—Sir Timothy Monday

This I presented to Miss Wetherby, who received it with a composure that was either admirable restraint or very good manners.

But the true prize was less easily shelved. I declared her, for the remainder of the term, Keeper of the Word-Hoard—a title at once absurd and, to the right mind, irresistible. It conferred upon her the dangerous liberty of correcting both pupil and master, a seat of quiet distinction, and the occasional invitation to assist in devising future linguistic torments.

More importantly, it conferred recognition: not the noisy applause of a moment, but the settled understanding among her peers that she had, in this curious field, gone further than most.

I should not have been surprised to learn, years later, that she had become one of the most eminent grammarians in England. She had, at fifteen, already grasped what many of us only pretend to know: that language is not a museum of origins but a workshop of use; that purity, pursued as an idol, becomes a farce; yet that constraint, applied as an art, can yield a bracing clarity.

What, then, were the moral findings of my little trial?

First, that English is gloriously mongrel, and that any attempt to kennel it is doomed to comic failure. Our speech is a long banquet at which the guests have forgotten who invited whom, and the dishes—Saxon, Norman, Latinate—have mingled so thoroughly that only the pedant insists on separating the sauces.

Second, that constraint sharpens thought. When the easy word is barred, the mind must either grow nimble or fall silent. Most fell silent; a few grew nimble; one, memorably, did so with elegance.

Third, that teachers ought, from time to time, to set tasks whose chief outcome is not measurable success but instructive embarrassment. Nothing reveals the joints of a language like the moment it refuses to carry your weight.

And lastly—though I offer this with the caution due to any grand conclusion—that there is a peculiar pleasure in watching words return to their older shapes, like furniture restored. One would not wish to live always in such a house; it is too bare, too earnest.

But to spend a week there is to come back to one's usual rooms with a keener eye, a lighter hand, and a renewed respect for the odd, unruly, magnificently borrowed thing we call English.