Florence, Y'All

Before I left New York, I had a lot of thoughts about what would and wouldn't be hard to explain in English. My experience so far isn't so much that my thoughts were wrong, as that I was focused on entirely the wrong worries and the wrong challenges.

For instance, much of my focus was on the vast array of English idioms and cultural expressions (see "So How is Everybody on Walton's Mountain?", http://fareastsideminyan.blogspot.com/2007/10/so-how-is-everybody-on-waltons-mountain.html). How, I wondered, would I convey to students what was meant by the phrase "win-win proposition"? How would I explain to my students why my mother was now a Red Hat momma? Could a non-native speaker possibly grasp that "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" have somehow come to mean the same thing?

In discussing this with a good friend, the venerable Dr. Deborah Mowshowitz of Columbia University's Biology Department and a mainstay of the West Side branch of the Far East Side Minyan (better known to family and friends as "Debby"), she told me that there was a simple solution to expressions like "win-win proposition", and this was that my job as an English teacher was to teach my students good grammatical English, so that they would be appalled by an expression like "win-win proposition", if they were ever to descent low enough into the bowels of hell to find it. Well, with all proper respect to Debby, I think this point of view ultimately grows out of snobbishness.

Because the main trouble with EFL in Taiwan, I keep finding, is that, aside from non being native speakers, the English teachers who work in Taiwan's public schools are far too focused on form rather than meaning or context. The result are legions of students who can write down the form of the future perfect ("They will have gone") but have difficulty with the rudiments of conversational English.

What this has made me realize is that what well-educated Anglophones think of when they think of The English Language is far too high-falutin', to use a none-too high-falutin' expression. Good English is not just the intricacies of can and may, or knowing not to use anxious to mean eager, or (a particular bugbear of mine) egregious to mean excessive. It's also such basic building blocks of the tongue as the personal pronouns, the words for book and chair and table and pencil case, and the kind of language you need to carry on a basic getting-to-know-you conversation with a newcomer to your church, mosque, ward, or minyan.

My overall approach to language has thus gotten a lot less snobby. I am more aware now of how little of what we think of as "good English grammar" really has anything to do with people's ability to communicate. "I have eat dinner" may not be as good grammar as "I have to eat dinner" or "I have eaten dinner," but 99 times in 100, the meaning will be clear from context, and the speaker will get his point across. I still wince at "Tomorrow I shopping," but I always know exactly what this means.

I have also become more aware that much of what we think is really essential to communication is due only to convention. Personal pronouns are a case in point. It is not inherently more natural to have gendered pronouns than not to have them. Equivalents of he and she may exist in most European languages, but is such a distinction really necessary to communication? I am coming to think it really isn't. The Chinese somehow manage without it. I have become sufficiently accustomed to Ruby's saying he to refer to our boss "Eve" that I don't generally bother to correct her. If I fail to understand her when she uses he to mean she, I've come to realize that this is a result of my fault and my prejudice. When Ruby uses he with the antecedent Eve, and I start wondering what man Ruby has talked about that I have somehow missed, this is not an innate response but a result of cultural conditioning.

This experience has even made me reconsider my opposition to y'all. Ardent Southerners will defend y'all, on the grounds that it gives English something it has not had in the centuries since thou fell out of use (at this point, even the poets avoid it): a means of distinguishing the second-person singular from the second-person plural. I used to think this was a straw-horse argument. English "naturally" did not have a second-person plural; us Yankees managed to get along without it, as did legions of Bits, Aussies, Kiwis, and South Africans. But I now realize that a distinction between one person being addressed and (potentially) a multitude being addressed is actually a more pressing, real need than distinguishing gender. Just think how many passages in the Bible would become much clearer if the Hebrew ata and atem could be properly rendered into English! But I still draw a line at all y'all. At least for now.

Outside the city of Florence, Kentucky, apparently sits a water tower with the words "Florence, Y'all." I know this because a picture of it is prominently displayed in the Wikipedia article on "Y'all (if you needed any confirmation that Wikipedia has an article on everything under the sun, this would be it). The caption to the picture indicates that the water tower was originally supposed to read Florence Mall, since it sits on land leased from a site under development as a local mall. The tower, however, was finished before the mall, and could not be labeled Florence Mall as this would violate local highway codes. And so it says, Florence Y'All!

Frankly, I would be in favor of every town in Kentucky having a water tower with such a sign. How Dantean that would be! If places like Paducah and Florence could all have a warning sign letting all of us know to abandon hope.