Linguistic bullying: How we assert cultural superiority through our use of English

How many times have we looked down upon Americans because they drop the u from favour and colour, or reverse the re in centre and metre, not to mention their complete bastardization of manoeuvre and cheque. In my formative years, it was common for English teachers to take an occasional swipe at Americans for their corruption of our mother tongue, to ensure that we proper Canadians adhered to our British roots and not be influenced by the degradation of our language as perpetrated by the US media.

Interestingly, though, the same teachers who smugly admonished the Americans for their labors and theaters also blithely ignored the UK spellings of pedeatrics, aeroplane, tyre, ageing, travelling – not to mention all those -ise suffixes that unwittingly became -ize. So much for our proud British linguistic heritage. Seems the Americans got some things right, but that would be very un-Canadian to admit.

In Singapore, I found myself on the opposite end of the linguistic taunting.

In one of my first editing gigs, I found our writers were consistently writing "speak to" or "talk to" rather than "speak with" or "talk with". The introduction of an interview would read something like, "I sat down with the artist over coffee to talk to him about his work," or "I spoke to the British High Commissioner about his new posting."

Now, there’s nothing egregiously wrong with speak to. In many cases it can be interchangeable with speak with. In these specific cases, though, I often changed to to with because speak with implies a dialogue, while speak to implies one person doing most of the talking, usually in admonishment.

My senior editor noticed my changes and had a talk to me about it. "I’ve noticed you keep changing 'speak to' to 'speak with'. I don't understand why."

I gave my explanation. And I assured her that if she didn’t want me to make those changes in her articles, if she said that it was her personal style, I would have been fine with it. It’s not the kind of matter that the average reader would notice, anyway; editors are far more sensitive to tone.

But it went one huge step further. "The British never say speak with or talk with. You Canadians have been too influenced by those lazy Americans."

Now, wait a minute. Someone just asserted some kind of cultural superiority here and just disparaged two other nationalities in the process.

This wasn't the first time I experienced something like this in one of my overseas offices. Here I was in British-influenced Singapore, dealing with British-educated South African editors -- basically facing the prestige of British English as fixed upon three continents -- and, well, I, the puny, Ahmercunized Canadian was trampled and shushed pretty damn quick in any debate over language usage.

"Seriously?" I shouldn’t have challenged her, but I was dumbfounded by what I was hearing. "Why would the Brits never say they spoke with somebody? How can that possibly be incorrect?" Perhaps it could be confused with the concept of speaking with a characteristic – "He spoke with confidence." Then again, you can walk with a person and walk with confidence at the same time, so...

No clear explanation emerged. Her only retort was, “It would make any British person bristle to hear that.” And thus, speak with was banished from our magazine, permanently.

I thought this might have been the peculiar wont of this particular editor, but no. Friends of mine who were educated by the British in Singapore and China, I discovered, were taught the same nonsensical rule, all in the name of the Brits holding a monopoly on proper English; anyone who speaks differently surely must have been influenced by a lesser culture. (And to digress, the British habit of referring to a sports team, musical group or corporation in plural – “Microsoft are a large company” – is another pet peeve of mine. It’s the kind of adulteration I’d expect from, well, Americans.)

When my editor informed me of this apparently age-old rule of Most Proper British English, I just had to look it up for myself. Apparently, though, from my research, the British authors of some of the English language’s finest literature couldn't agree less:

Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: I have never yet had the courage to say to you, sir, what in full openness I ought to have said when you first talked with me on this subject.

The Old Curiosity Shop: “You are better?” said the child, stopping to speak with him.

William Shakespeare

Troilus and Cressida: We come to speak with him; and you shall not sin.

Coriolanus: Men. I am an officer of state, and come to speak with Coriolanus.

Twelfth Night: I told him you were sick; he takes on him to understand so much, and therefore comes to speak with you.

Oscar Wilde, Salome

SALOME: What a strange voice. I would speak with him.

FIRST SOLDIER. I fear it may not be, Princess. The Tetrarch does not suffer any one to speak with him. He has even forbidden the high priest to speak with him.

SALOME: I desire to speak with him.

Christopher Marlowe

Faustus: I’ll speak with him now, or I’ll break his glass windows about his ears.

Emily Bronte

Shirley: I talked with the other ladies as well as I could, but still I looked at her.

The Professor: But whether she read to me, or talked with me; whether she teased…

Agatha Christie

The Mysterious Mr. Quin: “It is such a long time since I have talked with anyone…”

Death on the Nile: “Will you come and speak with Mr. Doyle, please, Monsieur Poirot...”

P.D. James

The Lighthouse: Dalgliesh said, “I shall, of course, need to speak with everyone individually, apart from meeting them all in the library.”

Innocent Blood: It was time he took a day off, time too that he walked and talked with another human being.

D.H. Lawrence

Women in Love: Halliday went out into the corridor to speak with him.

Sons and Lovers: My brother will be awfully pleased to talk with you.

The Story of Marraige: and that night he talked with Frieda for a long time

Harold Pinter

The Homecoming: where she had met Kyogo Moriya for the first time and talked with him

All I can conclude is that someone at some point in time self-invented a new rule and called it British just so that expatriates could go forth into the world with yet one more example of how every other nation gets English wrong.

But I don’t mean to pound on the Brits. As I pointed out earlier, Canadians can be just as guilty of this habit. When you look deeper into the origins of these linguistic rules, the root is not always in the culture, but in organizations (such as influential school boards and publishers) that have had one or two people enforce their own preference as an in-house rule that then filters through the culture at large.

This article from the New York Times gives one of the best demonstrations of just how this happens: Beware of Grammarians Who Rule by Whim (NYT, Dec 2008)