1985 (34 page)

The simplification of such elements of inflection as parts of verbs, declension of pronouns, irregularities of pluralization in nouns could, it was admitted, be pushed a great deal further than the forms actually formulated in
A Grammar of Workers' English
(His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1980), but it was recognized that certain traditional irregularities had been long condoned by considerations of prosody, apart from the fact that the British working class, itself a development out of the Anglo-Saxon serf class, accepts the patterns of vowel-gradation, characteristically Teutonic, at a deep level, whose genetic, as opposed to cultural, provenance has still to be sufficiently examined. Thus, there
seemed no necessity to rationalize
man/men, woman/women, mouse/mice
etc., into pluralizing patterns on the
cat/cats, dog/dogs, box/boxes
formula, though, in later developments, there may be some attempt to make such rationalization an optional, and even creditable, feature of Workers' English.

That a considerable economy has been effected in verb conjugation may be seen chiefly in the invariable negative form
ain't
, which serves to negate the present tense of both
to be
and
to have
:

He ain't there = He isn't there

He ain't been there = He hasn't been there

The preterite of
to be
takes the invariable form
was
(
I was
etc, but also
we was
etc), though the present tense remains, at present, identical with that of the verb in Bourgeois English (BE). In strong verbs, preterite and past participle are usually the same in form – as in
I done it; I ain't done it
– though the choice of form from the two available in BE follows a seemingly arbitrary procedure:

I seen it; I've seen it    (BE past part.)

I done it; I've done it   (BE past part.)

I ate it; I've ate it         (BE pret.)

I swum; I've swum      (BE past part.)

I forgot; he's forgot     (BE pret.)

I wrote; he's wrote      (BE pret.)

I fell; it's fell    (BE pret.)

I drunk it; I've drunk it  (BE past part.)

Considerations of syllabic economy seem to determine the preference for the shorter of the two forms available (
wrote
, not
written; forgot
, not
forgotten
), but there is no ready explanation of
seen
for
saw
and
done
for
did
in the demotic tradition embodied in WE. It should be noted also that there has never been, in that tradition, any impulse to level strong verbs under weak forms (
I eat
;
I eated
etc); the ablaut transformation – as also in certain nouns – is rooted deeply in the language of the workers, and the rational weakening of strong verbs, desirable to the regularizing philologist, would find no acceptance among WE speakers, who would consider such formations as ‘childish'.

The verb
get
– not always considered elegant in bourgeois education, so that
rise
has been preferred to
get up
and
enter
to
get in
– is regarded as a useful form in WE and its increased use in verbal phrases may, it is hoped, enable a vast number of verbs to be eliminated from the language. Indeed, it is believed that, with the exception of such verbs as
to be
and
to have
, practically all existing verbs can be replaced by a
get
-phrase. Thus:

drink = get some drink down

eat = get grub in your guts

live = get some living done

eliminate = get rid (shot) of

fuck off = get the fuck out of here

sleep = get your head (swede, loaf) down

read = get some reading done; get your head into a book; get a bit of bookwork into your fat lazy swede, etc.

Admittedly, it may be necessary to employ a verbal noun or gerund in a
get
phrase, but the indicative mood of the great majority of verbs can, in time, be rendered supererogatory.

Pronouns in the demotic English of industrial regions have rarely shown a willingness to imitate the invariables of rural dialects, (
give un to I; he do hate she,
etc.), and only the levelling of the demonstrative adjective
those
under the form of the demonstrative pronoun
them
and the occasional use of us for
me
– as in
give us one of them bottles there
– may be adduced as indicative of a need for rationalization in this area. An attempt, in early pedagogic experiments with WE, to replace
she
and
her
with the invariable Lancashire
oo
(from Anglo-Saxon
heo
) was greeted, even in Lancashire industrial towns, with strong resistance.

Before considering the semantics of WE, a word may be said about its phonetics. It is felt that no legislation from the State's philologists is required as regards pronunciation, whose regional variants are accepted as unlikely to impair the unity of WE. Only one traditional BE phoneme has been omitted from the consonantal inventory, this being the aspirate, and the typographical signal of its absence – the apostrophe – is regarded as a regrettable relic of an age when Bourgeois English posed as a standard to which other varieties (rural, industrial and colonial) aspired. The following sentences are considered orthographically correct:

Enry Erbert Iggins, being ot and in a hurry, ad to ang is at up in the all.

E's a orrible unk of atefulness.

On the other hand, the aspirate is to be retained as an emphasizer, only initially however, in such statements as, ‘I said, eat up my dinner, not heat it up' (the meaning here being diametrically opposed to the meaning conveyed by a speaker of BE when uttering this sentence). This means that the presence of an emphatic aspirate has absolutely no etymological or lexical significance, being a purely pro-sodic device:

The law is a hass.

You're a hugly great hidiot.

Coincidentally, of course, emphatic aspiration may match phonemic usage in BE, but the statement, ‘You're horrible,' in WE represents no return to BE pseudo-gentility of utterance. The phoneme
ng
in verbal-noun terminations having been traditionally replaced in demotic, as well as rural genteel, usage by
n
, this usage is now formulated as regular. The fricatives found initially in
thin
and
then
are to be regarded, considering their absence in the phonemic inventories of most metropolitan speakers, as optional in speech, being replaced by
f
and
v
respectively, though the digraph is retained in writing and printing.

We come now to the question of vocabulary and that principle of economy of lexis which, instinctually consulted in traditional demotic, is to be more deliberately and rationally applied to the development of WE as a living and progressive language. Generally speaking, the speaker or writer of WE is expected to possess a trade vocabulary, wherein amplitude and exactness may constitute factors of efficiency and safety (thus, the generic
thing
or
wotsit
or
oojah
or
gadget
will not serve in the designation of parts of a machine which have opposed functions), and a social vocabulary whose elements are of mainly Teutonic origin and serve to denote physical and emotional states and processes. WE is not concerned with the abstractions of philosophy or even science, though, for rhetorical purposes, an arbitrary sub-lexis of polysyllables of Latin or even Greek origin is available, whose lexicographical definition is regarded as otiose. Examples of such terms are
verification, obstropulosity, fornicator, supercodology
:

I ask you in all bleeding verification whether or not you think it's bloody fair.

I've had enough of his bloody obstropulosity and I'm bleeding well going to do the bastard.

That fucking fornicator got his hands in my coat pocket when I'd got my eyes on the dartboard.

Don't get working on any of that supercodology when I'm around, mate, or you'll get a bunch of fives in the fag-hole.

(Here in deference to the BE reader's habits, traditional orthography is used.)

Generally speaking, statements in WE are expected to be of a tautologous nature, thus fulfilling the essential phatic nature of speech; as modern linguistics teaches us, non-tautologous statements are either lies or meaningless:

I like a nice pint when I've done my work, because a nice pint's bloody nice, mate.

The working class is all right, because they're a very nice class of people.

I love that girl, I can't hardly keep my hands off of her.

They want to get rid of that new left-half, because he's no bleeding good.

(It will be noticed that qualifiers of emphasis formerly regarded as obscene have full lexical status in WE.)

As an example of the expressive capacities of WE, a rendering of the opening of a well-known speech in Shakespeare's
Hamlet
may here be appended:

To get on with bloody life or not to, that's what it's all about really. Is it more good to get pains in your fuckin loaf worryin about it
or to get stuck into what's getting you worried and get it out of the way and seen off? To snuff it is only like getting your head down, and then you get rid of the lot, anyway that's how we'd like to have it . . .

The passage from the Declaration of Independence which Orwell regarded as untranslatable into Newspeak yields easily enough to WE, though its meaning is somewhat modified:

This is true, and there's no arguing the toss over it, that everybody's got the same rights to belong to a union, to live for ever, to do what the hell he wants to do, and watch TV, get drunk, sleep with a woman, and smoke. It's the job of governments to let the unions give union members what they want, and if the governments do not do what the unions want, then they have to get kicked out.

Do you really think this is going to happen?

A question to be answered by waiting a few years. It's always foolish to write a fictional prophecy that your readers are very soon going to be able to check. Take it that I merely melodramatize certain tendencies. In Britain, the unions are certainly growing stronger and more intolerant. But by the unions I probably merely mean the more belligerent union leaders. I leave out of account too, as Orwell did more spectacularly, the good sense and humanity of the average worker.

I'm an American, and it seems to me absurd that the USA could ever become Unhappy Syndicalized America. American society will never be tyrannized by the unions
.

Probably not. I was extrapolating certain experiences of my own in the field of American show business. The tyranny of the musicians' union, for instance, on Broadway. It's hard to prophesy the future of the United States. That cacotopia of Sinclair Lewis's,
It Can't Happen Here
, still seems to me to be the most plausible projection, though it was written in the thirties. At least it shows how a tyranny can come about through the American democratic process, with a president American as apple pie, as they say – a kind of cracker-barrel Will Rogers type appealing to the philistine anti-intellectual core of the American electorate. Core? More than the core, the whole fruit except for the thin skin of liberalism. My old pappy used to say: Son, there ain't no good books except the Good Book. Time these long-haired interlettles got their comeuppance, and so on. And so book-burning, shooting of radical schoolmasters, censorship of progressive newspapers. Every repressive act justified out of the Old Testament and excused jokingly in good spittoon style.

I think we're past the naïveté of letting mere novelists do the prophesying. They're fantasists, they don't really examine trends. The futures they present couldn't possibly have their beginnings in the present we know
.

True. Novelists have given up writing future fiction. They leave that to the think-tank people. What fantasy-writers like to do nowadays is to imagine a past when history took a turning different from the one it did take, and then create an alternative present based on that past. Keith Robert's
Pavane
, for example, and Kingsley Amis's
The Alteration
both posit that the Christian Reformation never got to the Anglo-Saxons, with the result in both of the killing of the empirical spirit, which means the death of science. And so a modern world without electricity and a powerful theocracy ruling it from Rome. Amusing, stimulating, but a time-game. Prophecy is no longer the province of the fictional imagination, as I say, as you say. The question is: are the futurologists of MIT and elsewhere doing the prophetic job any better?

It's not a question of prophecy. Professor Toffler tells us that the future's already here, in the sense that a technology and a way of life are being imposed on us that belong neither to the past nor the present. A lot of people, he says, are in a state of shock at what they regard as things alien to the present. When your thinking and feeling and, above all, your nervous system reject certain innovations, then the future's arrived and what you have to do is to catch up with it. The symptoms of rejection are hysteria or apathy or both. People drug themselves out of the present which is really the future, or else exile themselves into pre-industrial cultures. Violence, madness, neuroses of all kinds abound. We don't define the future in temporal terms, but in terms of the new stimulus that overstimulates to dementia. The future's a solid body we've never seen before – something dumped on the shore for the wary natives to sniff at and run away from. Then they come back, see what it is, accept. The future has become the present. Then we await the next new solid bodies, with the inevitable syndrome of temporary rejection
.