English can be a cold, precise, “black and white” language, if that’s what you need.
You can use it with great precision, to say exactly what you want to say. Not only lawyers and scientists, who have their own special jargon, but also laymen can say what they want to say with complete accuracy.
Most English language textbooks are focused on clarity. After all, who would want to invest time and money learning a language, only to find that their meaning was unclear to someone else?
But the real joy of English is more than just the precision it offers. The thing that gets me interested is its flexibility. It is capable of great poetry, sidesplitting humour, uplifting exciting prose, and much more.
But you need to know a bit about the origins of the English language, to see where its flexibility comes from, so please glance at a map of the world.
England is basically the southern half of the bigger of two small islands off the north west coast of the European mainland. It has always been open to invasion and migration. In pre-historic times it saw successive migrations of various ethnic groups from Europe, arriving and blending their languages together.
The Romans arrived around 2000 years ago, and stayed for around 400 years, adding Mediterranean Latin to the linguistic mix. Then came a succession of Germanic tribes, and the Vikings from Scandinavia.
By around a thousand years ago the language known as Anglo-Saxon had begun to settle down, but then the Normans invaded from France. They were themselves of Scandinavian origin, by the way, but used an ancestor of modern French as their language.
Small wonder, after all these languages had been blended together, that English can be baffling!
Take the Normans, for example. After defeating King Harold (at the battle of Hastings, in 1066), who was anyway basically a Viking from Scandinavia, they set themselves up at the top of the social pyramid and became the ruling class. In their castles they spoke Norman French, while the people in the villages spoke Anglo-Saxon English. That’s why we find “cows” and “cattle” in a farmer’s field, but we eat “beef”. “Cow” comes from the Anglo-Saxon root of English, and “beef” is from Norman French.
It took centuries for the mixing of the two major languages to settle down into one spoken tongue, but they eventually did. By the time of England’s greatest writer (William Shakespeare, 1564 to 1616) the language was pretty well set up as it is today. An English schoolchild has little difficulty reading and understanding Shakespeare, but anything written even a century earlier is very hard to puzzle out.
Shakespeare was obviously an exceptional user of the language, but he was also probably the most important creator of it. His works are absolutely full of words (nearly 3000 of them!) and phrases that simply did not exist, or at least had never been written down, before he wrote them.
It is very hard to demonstrate the debt that English owes to Shakespeare, without boring the reader with hundreds of examples. But I’ll give you just three phrases that Shakespeare gave us.
First, here’s a phrase that should be prominent in every sporting event, because we all want to see “fair play”. Shakespeare created it in one of his less popular plays (King John), but the phrase has become universal in the English-speaking world.
Secondly, we have a phrase that means “all at once”. We say, for example, “The police captured the gang in “one fell swoop””. We mean that they grabbed them suddenly, and all together. Few native English speakers would recognise that the phrase refers to the practise of falconry, or that the meaning of “fell” is not the past tense of “fall”, but is in fact an old descriptive term meaning “deadly”. So- the sudden deadly swoop of a falcon onto its prey. But most native speakers would happily use the phrase, never imagining that Shakespeare created it!
And finally, here’s a phrase you often hear, created by Shakespeare, but no one remembers that! When, say, an unpopular boss is fired, or a poor government is voted out of office, we say it’s “a good riddance”. Actually, the word “riddance” doesn’t exist any more, but we have no difficulty using this non-existent “riddance” in a handy phrase to express satisfaction that something or someone has gone away, maybe forever.
For me, the joy of English is that its various ethnic sources, and the efforts of some genius writers, have given it “colour”. They’ve provided ways of being funny, sad, and uplifting- all in one sentence if you want! They allow you to be spontaneous and to use unusual words to achieve an effect.
Good use of the variety in English can make it wonderfully entertaining to hear or to read. And English does not have to be your mother tongue for you to use it colourfully. Anyone learning English as an additional language can learn to put some colour into it. It’s just a matter of good instruction and some hard work, as always.
Fortunately, if you live in Jakarta, the professionals at Aim can help you put colour into your English, at the same time as they help lift your overall confidence in using it.