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Globish and English
by Malcolm Evans| Brighton, UK
Saturday, 6 November 2010
tags: culture, emergence, europe, fuzzy sets, global/local, making sense, semiotics, socioeconomics
It’s fortunate for the English that they happen to speak American. But for that historical accident post-imperial decline would have been steeper, an economy devastated by fraudulent bankers (AKA “financial instruments of imponderable complexity combined with the effect of digital globalisation”) and printing more money (“quantitative easing”) would be in even worse shape. In this context an irritating English behaviour (shared by some Americans) is to over-complicate Globish, English's accessible lingua franca version, with obscure local references, ironies and wordplays. Even UK and US semioticians are prone to this before they evolve more global souls. The symptoms are linguistic dandyism, verbal tics, jargonistic Tourettes – emperor’s new clothes of showbiz quasi-science. Fact is if you don’t want to communicate you’re not a semiotician. Better be a mime artist or a hairdresser. Or a beautician.
If however, like me, you enjoy engaging with some of these deviations from standard Globish – if you’re planning a visit to London, for example – here are a few tips to help demystify otherwise unhelpful obscurities.
Pardon my French
This sketch takes some liberties with everyday obscenity. If this offends, don’t read on. Should you wish to experiment with phrases you fear may cause offence to English or American interlocutors, lapses in decorum will always be forgiven if you add the idiom “pardon my French”. And remember an American will not understand ‘arsehole’ – the correct appelation is ‘asshole’.
At the Bar
Traditional pleasantries for putting a London barman at ease include “Are your nuts fresh?” (eyeline to the peanuts not the groin) and “Do you have cold Pils?” (working in roughly the same figurative area while accessing the English affection for tasteless beer – works best with a subtle German inflection to the voice). At more fashionable lifestyle bars try ordering a cool new cocktail like Tiny Todger, the one inspired by Rolling Stone Keith Richards’s intimate observations on Mick Jagger’s penis in his recent autobiography – jump the queue at the bar and shout “Mine’s a Tiny Todger!” In this Jagger is an iconic metaphor for England today and perpetuates a trend initiated by George W. Bush and Tony Blair. We now know that it wasn’t WMDs or even regime change that lay behind Shock and Awe. Tiny todgers scuppered Rumsfeld and Condi Rice’s initial plan for Blair and Bush to do man to man combat with bin Laden and Mullah Omar in the desert, in a cage like the one used in Mel Gibson's Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. With the same Tina Turner “We Don’t Need Another Hero” soundtrack. It’s a tough call but my money would have been on Omar, unless Blair’s lisp triggered unconscious recollections of Mike Tyson’s. If the Cockney barman is female, try admiring her breasts and saying “tickle your arse with a feather”. She will reply “You what?” in feigned indignation, to which the appropriate response is “Particularly nasty weather”. Only try that one if it’s raining. Always remember that peanuts in bowls on bars in English pubs are 75 percent urine by weight. Try a sealed branded variety. How about Nobby’s Nuts?
Muslims, Chavs and Luvvies
Sexism, racism, ageism, antisemitism and homophobia are all punishable in England by ostracism from polite (‘luvvie’) society. It’s expected, however, that people will be casually and openly offensive about Muslims and the working class. According to official ideology the latter ceased to exist in 1986 yet they are universally recognised and publicly derided as ‘Chavs’, whose cultural positioning is below that of the Ainu in Japan, the Australian aborigines or the indigenous and largely demoralised Celtic native Britons – the Irish, Scots and Welsh. In bourgeois ideology Chavs are characterised by obesity, extensive tattooing and piercing, shaved heads and football shirts in the male, and ironic uncouthness, enthusiastic adoption of hardcore pornography signifiers plus feisty abnegation of traditional femininity in the female. A London-based Russian female semiotician (unscientifically and off the record) comments: “If you want to understand why so many English men are gay, look at the women”. Chavs used to wear Burberry but Abercrombie & Fitch and Superdry are current brands of choice. Luvvies are everybody else – verbally articulate people with no sense of fashion or rhythm.
English identity, despite attempts at disguise, tends towards the Luvvie, Chav or Muslim. After the military adventurism, crimes of bankers and current attempts to make the population at large deal with the tab for years to come, the systematic dismantling (under the guise of necessity rather than political choice) of what remained from the post-World War 2 vision of a fairer social order – after all this it is wise to approach carefully not expecting too much in terms of optimism, ebullience, creativity, good will.
The green shots will emerge in the cracks and the synergies. Traditional working-class solidarity, scepticism, resistance (helped by new media) to propaganda and escapist pap media, rediscovery of industrial and other forms of activism. The openness, tolerance, responsibility, shared humanity and progressive attitude traditionally associated with middle-class professionals – commitment to equality and fraternity beyond a fetishising of liberty alone (particularly the neoliberal distortion of this into economic liberalisation). From the positive Muslim perspective harmony, respect, active caring for those less privileged, a powerful alternative vision to the reductiveness of market individualism, materialism, image and lifestyle aspiration. For now just look out for a kind of Islam-respecting luvvie-chav synergising process. Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy Then as Farce is a helpful start point. Remember when you see England’s Muslim-scapegoating front-page tabloid headlines that some of the forerunners of these journalists and press lords were Hitler sympathisers in the 1930s. And remember Roland Barthes who was probably at his most Englsh when he wrote in Mythologies in the 1950s that the best semiology is also SEMIOCLASM. This means vigilance and resistance at every turn, breaking open mystifying language and imagery, refusing to let it function as it would wish – to slide past our critical faculties by appearing perfectly ‘natural’ and uncontestable.
© Malcolm Evans 2010
7 November 2010 at 7:10 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
Just don’t make me be Paul McCartney. I know how cruel you Stones fans are to poor Macca.
Regarding fuzzy mapping, the great semiotician Sherlock Holmes says (in “Hound of the Baskervilles”) that “the more outré and grotesque an incident is, the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case [map?] is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it.”
The tireless mapper of the various centers of gravity of own individual subjectivity is the American philosopher/activist Cornel West, who says things like “I am a Chekhovian Christian with existential democratic commitments tempered by the experience of growing up African-American during the height of James Brown’s fast-funk period…”
7 November 2010 at 12:59 pm
Malcolm Evans says:
Interesting that you pick out the idea, Josh, which was most tentative for me at the time. That’s a strength of semiotic paradigms/fuzzy sets – that you can map out what feels mappable then proceed incrementally into exploring the gaps and crossing the divides collaboratively, helping to engineer emerging meanings as well as identify them. The idea of a UK people semiotic segmentation is one I want to develop. Chavs, Luvvies and Muslims immediately invite some supplementation, of course. For me the next big group to pop up are the Corporates. These emerged as the main beneficiaries of Thatcherism in the 80s and 90s (Yuppies were an early manifestation) and became the main operators – via neoliberal financial, economic, management and marketing discourses – of the ideology semioclasm now needs to clean up in the wake of market fundamentalism’s unseemly collapse. It would be interesting to interface this process of thought and language decontamination reflexively with what semioticians are seeing in emerging markets with their local iterations of the developing market economy and corporate discourses. Of course these are cultural categories not hard and fast reductive definitions of fixed groups of people – and reflect for many of us different needs and dispositions that help configure our individual subjectivities in different ways dependent on context, with our main centre of gravity being, perhaps, in one segment.
6 November 2010 at 11:55 pm
Greg says:
If I am Keith and Malcolm is Mick who is Ronny? ( the ever- genial Rob Thomas, who despite being in the business for 12 years is still considered as one of the new boys?) Josh Glenn is Brian Jones, his head spinning with esoteric brilliance even as he drives into a swimming pool.
6 November 2010 at 11:47 pm
Greg says:
Speaking as the Keith Richards of commercial semiotics I agree with much of the above. However I have noticed that ‘polite’ society in vernacular has become more confortable with sexism, racism, homophobia and rascism. It seems just as the Etsblishment under Blair encouraged liberal legislation it opened a release valve in popular culture to take the piss out of gays, Jews, blacks etc (to wit; little Britain). I find Stewart Lee and Harry and Paul far more palatable. I still think satirizing the powerful is the most important function of comedy, not beating down further on the repressed. Call me old fashioned but I would rather have seen Tony Blaire questioned about his bowel movements on comic relief than interact with Catherine Tate’s character.
6 November 2010 at 6:06 pm
Josh Glenn says:
“Islam-respecting luvvie-chav synergising process” — this might be a perfect description of the vibe in certain hipster neighborhoods in the US.