Len Murray’s piece (25 April) on the English used by contributors to BBC Scotland’s football programmes raises a number of issues. To begin, his frequent use of the first person underlines that what he’s expressing is a personal view. His personal view refers to ‘slovenly speech’, the adjective implying failure to reach an accepted standard, and begging the obvious question ‘accepted by who/whom?’
Len asserts that certain language forms are ‘correct’, but they’re not correct in the sense (for example) that it is correct that water boils at a hundred degrees Celsius. They’re not part of the natural order of the universe. They’re ‘correct’ only to the extent that certain social groups regard them as correct. Other groups (not only football pundits) appear to disagree. Why the latter groups’ preferences are less valid is not clear.
The reality is that very few English verbs differentiate between past participle and past tense. Len cites ‘I have saw’ as demonstrating ‘total ignorance of past participles’; in this context, if ‘saw’ isn’t a past participle, then what is it? The use of ‘have’ before the past verb form clearly indicates that the speaker is using the present perfect tense, in order to identify the action of seeing as happening recently. The meaning is perfectly clear. No less than it is in Shakespeare (‘I have already chose my officer’) or in the past perfect form employed by Jane Austen (‘the changes we had went through’). Apologies to purists for the lack of a main verb in the last sentence. Oops, I’ve did it again.
Linguistic precision is certainly required for cognitive thought, but none of the linguistic forms Len dismisses are less than precise. There are certainly aspects of grammar which are crucial to clarity, and these change with glacial slowness, if at all, precisely because they are essential. An example would be word order: if we reverse the order of words in the sentence ‘the dog bit the cat’, then we change its meaning. However, the same isn’t true when we say ‘they’ve came here’ instead of ‘they’ve come here’. The point of grammar is to minimise ambiguity, but unfortunately it’s often used to indicate a presumed superiority. Getting annoyed when a broadcaster says ‘we’ve went’ isn’t a linguistic evaluation; it’s an aesthetic judgement, and maybe even a social one. No doubt a number of the cleaners in the BBC conflate past participle with past tense, but when was the last time anyone wrote to the papers about it?
Of course it’s disingenuous to suggest that the information contained in an utterance is everything; of course it’s true that we define our identities every time we open our mouths, and at many (by no means all) job interviews, you’d be wise to observe the conventions of Standard English. However, to imply (as Leonard does) that conflating past tense and past participle is not part of our heritage is factually incorrect. Many of us can cite significant adults from our childhoods who used these despised forms. Like the BBC football pundits, if we’re hoping to impress Len with our use of language, we’re obviously failing miserably. Must try harder.
Dominic Brown is from Glasgow and works in
post-school education
