As I said here, my wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and I’ve gotten to another passage of sufficient Hattic interest to post. One of the protagonists is Hari Kumar, who was raised by his father Duleep to be a perfect Englishman; in this section we are learning about Duleep’s background:
Duleep Kumar was the youngest of a family of four boys and three girls. Perhaps a family of seven children was counted auspicious, for after his birth (in 1888) it seemed for several years that his parents were satisfied and intended no further addition. […] Of the four brothers only Duleep completed the course at the Government Higher School and went on to the Government College. His family thought that to study at the college was a waste of time, so they opposed the plan, but finally gave in. In later years he was fond of quoting figures from the provincial census taken round about this time, that showed a male population of twenty-four and a half million and a female population of twenty-three million. Of the males one and a half million were literate; of the females less than fifty-six thousand, a figure which did not include his three elder sisters. His father and brothers were literate in the vernacular, semi-literate in English. It was because as a youth Duleep had acquired a good knowledge of the language of the administrators that he began to accompany his father on visits to petition the sub-divisional officer, and had the first intimations of the secrets hidden behind the bland face of the white authority. There grew in him a triple determination – to break away from a landlocked family tradition, to become a man who instead of requesting favours, granted them, and to save Shalini from the ignorance and domestic tyranny not only his other sisters but his two elder brothers’ wives seemed to accept uncomplainingly as all that women could hope for from the human experience. When Shalini was three years old he began to teach her her letters in Hindi. When she was five she could read in English.
Duleep was now sixteen years old. The Government College to which he had gained admittance was at the other end of the earth: a hundred miles away. His mother wept at his going. His brothers scoffed. His elder sisters and sisters-in-law looked at him as if he were setting out on some shameful errand. His father did not understand, but gave him his blessing the night before his departure and in the morning accompanied him to the railway station in a doolie drawn by bullocks.
And perhaps that is when what could be called the tragedy of Duleep Kumar began. He was a boy whose passion for achievement was always just that much greater than his ability to achieve. And it was a passion that had become used to the constant irritants of home. Far removed from there, in the company of boys of diverse backgrounds but similar ambitions, the original sense of frustration upon which these passions had thrived began to diminish. Here, everyone was in the same boat, but as the BA course progressed he became uncomfortably aware of the process that separated the quickwitted from the plodders. For the first time in his life he found himself having to admit that other boys, if not actually cleverer, could certainly be quicker. Analysing this he came readily to an explanation. The quick boys, surely, all came from progressive homes where English was spoken all the time. On the college teaching staff there was a preponderance of Englishmen. At the Government Higher School, most of the instruction, although in English, had been in the hands of Indians. He had always understood exactly what the Indian teachers were saying, and he had often felt that what they were saying he could have said better. But now he sat through lectures increasingly at a loss to follow not the words so much as the thinking behind the words. And he did not dare to ask questions. Nobody asked questions. They listened attentively. They filled exercise books with meticulous notes of what they thought had been said. To ask questions was to admit ignorance. In a competitive world like this such an admission would probably have been fatal.
He was, however, discovering a new irritant: the frustrations not of a hidebound orthodox Indian family, but of the English language itself. Listening to his fellow students he was amazed that they seemed unable to comprehend the difference between the way they spoke and the way the Englishmen spoke. It was not only a question of pronunciation or idiom. He was too young to be able to formulate the problem. But he was aware of having come close to the heart of another important secret. To uncover it might lead to an understanding of what in the sub-divisional officer looked like simple arrogance and in the English teachers intellectual contempt.
There came a time when he was able to say to his son Hari: ‘It is not only that if you answer the phone a stranger on the other end would think he was speaking to an English boy of the upper classes. It is that you are that boy in your mind and behaviour. Conversely when I was your age, it was not only that I spoke English with an even stronger babu accent than I speak it now, but that everything I said, because everything I thought, was in conscious mimicry of the people who rule us. We did not necessarily admit this, but that is what was always in their minds when they listened to us. It amused them mostly. Sometimes it irritated them. It still does. Never they could listen to us and forget that we were a subject, inferior people. The more idiomatic we tried to be the more naïve our thinking seemed, because we were thinking in a foreign language that we had never properly considered in relation to our own. Hindi, you see, is spare and beautiful. In it we can think thoughts that have the merit of simplicity and truth. And between each other convey these thoughts in correspondingly spare, simple, truthful images. English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next. At least, this is so when it is written, and the English have usually confided their noblest aspirations and intentions to paper. Written, it looks like a way of gaining time and winning confidence. But when it is spoken, English is rarely beautiful. Like Hindi it is spare then, but crueller. We learned our English from books, and the English, knowing that books are one thing and life another, simply laughed at us. Still laugh at us. They laughed at me, you know, in that Indian college I went to before I came over here that first disastrous time to study law. At the college I learned the importance of obtaining a deep understanding of the language, a real familiarity with it, spoken and written. But of course I got it mostly all from books. A chapter of Macaulay was so much easier to understand, and certainly more exciting, than a sentence spoken by Mr Croft who taught us history. In the end I was even trying to speak Macaulayesque prose. Later I found out that any tortuous path to a simple hypothesis was known among the English staff as a Kumarism. And it was later still before I really understood that a Kumarism was not something admirable but something rather silly. But I think this notoriety helped me to scrape through. I was a long way down the list. But it was a triumph by my standards.’
(A doolie is “A rudimentary litter or palanquin used in India by the lower social classes, and as an army ambulance”; it’s from “Hindi ḍōlī a litter, a kind of sedan for women, etc., diminutive of ḍōlā swing, cradle, litter, < Sanskrit dōlā litter, swinging cradle, < dul- to swing.”) Of course, Hari’s perfect Englishness does him no good when he has to return to India.
I might also mention the phrase “civil lines,” an odd expression that recurs frequently in the novel and that the OED added in 2010:
(The name for) an area (in various South Asian cities) originally developed as a residential district for colonial administrators and civil servants.
1833 The civil lines, at the distance of two miles, are much more beautifully-situated, amidst well-wooded ravines.
Asiatic Journal & Monthly Register vol. 10 i. 591920 By 1 o’clock the crowds making for the civil lines were not merely those who were attempting to approach via Hall Gate.
Rep. Comm. Government India Disturbances Punjab ii. 23 in Parliamentary Papers (Cmd. 681) vol. XIV. 10011992 Kailasnath Choudhary..fought tooth and nail with the bureaucrats residing in the British-built bungalows of the Civil Lines to stop them from introducing an electric crematorium to the city.
World (BBC) April 23/12002 Wanted a flat in civil lines, Delhi between 1000–1200 sqft.
Sunday Times of India 22 September (Classifieds section) 2/1
Hindi, you see, is spare and beautiful. In it we can think thoughts that have the merit of simplicity and truth. And between each other convey these thoughts in correspondingly spare, simple, truthful images. English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.
This is, of course, utter bollocks throughout*; though I suppose one should not fall into the trap of attributing a fictional character’s opinions to the author.
* Pardon my spare lack of subtlety: it has, at least, the merit of simplicity and truth.
the “Kumarism” thread seems to mirror xenophobic tropes of many historical times when a disrespected minority gained a substantial influence in culture, education and economy through their command of book language and the logic of the formal discourse. Like Dostoyevsky’s derision towards the literate Poles or anti-Semitic backlash about the cultural and literary influences of the Soviet Jews.
“Babu” is the key word. It sums up this whole attitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_differences_and_dialects_in_Indian_English#Babu_English
It always reminds me of Hurree Chunder Mookherjee in Kim, who is an extremely astute and courageous intelligence officer, and who works the trope as part of his cover. (Kipling is a much more subtle author than he is given credit for by those who are understandably repelled by his politics.)
One is dealing here with the legacy of people like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay
Quite apart from the patronising bigotry, nobody who perpetrated this
https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius
can or should be forgiven for his crimes against literature.
A greatly preferable Thomas Babington Macaulay:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay_(Nigeria)
My own thoughts on this odd sequence of statements, is that the narrator is conflating the English language as a whole with English as spoken by those who hold political and social power, and want to keep that power and maintain dominance over the speakers of Hindi. It’s the ways that language reflects social and psychological phenomena, not about inherent features of one language as compared to another.
Would he have still thought that way, if he had to interact regularly with one or more native-Hindi-speaking aristocrats, who used that language to assume privilege and entitlement, and assert dominance?
Would he have still thought that way if he had noticed how he himself used the Hindi language when interacting with people of those castes that his society held to be “naturally” inferior in status?
[A comment of mine has just been nuked by Akismet, probably for repeated link-adding, though possibly for dissing Thomas Babington Macaulay. However, nothing of value was lost. I was basically agreeing with DP.]
Two things about the block-quoted text:
1. Starting out by saying Duleep was the youngest child before then introducing a younger sister seems … odd. Pretty much all non-youngest children in any given household were by definition previously the youngest for some period of time between their own birth and the birth of the next-oldest sibling. Maybe there’s something in the preceding paragraph that makes it clearer that this sentence is speaking as of that time rather than as of the “present” of the narrative as a whole?
2. I am struck by the phrase “become a man who instead of requesting favours, granted them.” Is it an allusion to some earlier thing I’m not thinking of immediately or was it original to Scott? It was probably not meant to evoke the flashback scene in the Godfather Part II where the young Vito kills Fanucci and thereby establishes/demonstrates what his role is in the local economy of favors …
This looked familiar to me, I am pretty sure from “Gunga Din”
@om
I recognised a sort of “perfidious Albion” trope (he even says ‘perfidy’), but this does not necessarily contradict what you say, although I would say it is more about the attitudes of the colonised individual who is using or hearing the coloniser’s language.
It’s back.
Some of it is culture shock (different cultures are spare about different things). Some consists of things that are more easily and widely noticed about languages learned later in life. Some of it is what Owlmirror said. And the rest is utter bollocks.
The things characters say in novels should generally not be equated with statements in textbooks.
Yes, my “utter bollocks” was intended only to apply to the attribution of mystical properties to languages. The broader point is another matter.
I don’t know how much Hindi Scott actually knew. (The WP articles don’t help a lot.) Many people can spend years in a place and acquire hardly anything of the local languages, even if they are not handicapped by xenophobia (Scott was clearly not.)
I once knew an excellent and highly effective Dutch nurse, who had been decades in Bolgatanga, was in no sense any kind of xenophobe or bigot, and was actually married to a local man, and who nevertheless knew no Farefare at all.
Come to that, how much Hindi is Duleep Kumar supposed to know? Describing one’s own mother tongue as “simple” argues for a certain lack of appreciation of its nuances …
Perhaps he is meant simply to have imbibed the awful Macaulay’s doctrine with regard to Indian languages and literatures. One still encounters quite a bit of similar psychic damage done to Africans by colonial attitudes to indigenous languages and cultures: even some of those hostile to overt colonialism have obviously (to an an outsider) unconsciously internalised some of the poison.
To my shame, I have not (yet) read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonising_the_Mind
but the title strikes me as spot on.
The things characters say in novels should generally not be equated with statements in textbooks.
Unless one is referring to textbooks mandated by government authorities in Texas.
“ A Bible-infused curriculum that Texas approved for public schools over pushback in 2024 will undergo corrections to fix hundreds of errors caught by teachers and education officials after the material was introduced to classrooms.
The curriculum in what is known as the “Bluebonnet” textbook is among Republican-led efforts in the US to incorporate more religious teaching into classrooms. Designed by the state’s public education agency, it is optional for schools to adopt, though they receive additional funding if they do so.
Bluebonnet was approved over concerns from religious scholars that the reading lessons favored Christianity over other faith traditions and pushback from advocacy groups that the materials inappropriately prioritized preaching over teaching.
The state board of education voted 8-6 Wednesday to approve the changes – which include correcting factual errors, fixing punctuation and replacing images due to licensing or copyright issues – after some members questioned the high number of errors.”
The above may be appropriate to a bad novel.
source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/texas-public-school-curriculum-corrections
the trap of attributing a fictional character’s opinions to the author
Of course it’s wrong to make such an attribution thoughtlessly, but it is often true to some extent, even if the character is not at all an author surrogate. I suspect some novelists can’t resist the opportunity to ventriloquize their own half-baked or eccentric opinions. A bit like pseudonymous blog commenters 👉👈
Bluebonnet was approved over concerns from religious scholars that the reading lessons favored Christianity over other faith traditions — Here “over” means “in spite of” rather than, as I initially thought, “because of”.
Any implication via silence that textbooks used in the K-12 public schools of the 49 other states of the Union are of uniformly high quality should be rejected as not empirically well-grounded.
Um, what? I read “favored … over” as meaning “favored … over,” i.e. “in preference to.”
I did too.
The “approved for public schools over pushback” in the first paragraph was a bit of an advance clue as to how to interpret the “over” in “approved over concerns” in the third paragraph. That is admittedly the first of two instances of “over” in the sentence mollymooly quoted but his comment only makes sense if he’s talking about that one rather than the second one.
@J.W.B.: *registers complete agreement about “approved over”*
On another subject, I’ve long thought of mollymooly as “she”. (And more recently, rozele— but maybe because of my ignorance of umlaut in Yiddish?) No doubt most of the people here who use monikers of unclear gender are doing so for a reason, but anyone who isn’t might consider mentioning their pronouns, at least once in a while.
Sorry yes, as JWB worked out, I meant the over in “approved over”, not the over in “favored over”.
I cannot actually recall what initially motivated me to post with my initials rather than fuller given name(s) before it became a matter of simple inertia or path-dependency, but I am authorized to confirm that it was not what motivated the likes of S.E. Hinton and E.L. Konigsburg to use that format.
@Jerry Friedman: With a moniker like “mollymooly,” it’s hard not to default to thinking of the holder as female; I sometimes have to remind myself. rozele, on the other hand, is a woman, although I can think of at least one recent comment that might lead one to assume otherwise.
@Brett: this is not an American usage, but in some other Anglophone societies (perhaps including Ireland) “Molly” can be a male nickname. E.g., in Scotland it can reportedly substitute for “Malcolm” and I thought the same was true in Australia but now wikipedia tells me that the famous (male) Australian-music-scene personality Molly Meldrum was born Ian Alexander Meldrum so I don’t know where he got the nickname.
On another subject, I’ve long thought of mollymooly as “she”. (And more recently, rozele— but maybe because of my ignorance of umlaut in Yiddish?)
I hadn’t paid specific attention, but that sounds like a fairly correct description of my general impression for both. Are either of them supposed to be a “he”?
One previous LH-commenter case where I did mess it up in that direction [i.e. assumed “she” but correctly “he”] was Noetica.
mollymooly has posted here subsequent to the gender issue being raised, and has not been drawn!
(FWIW, my handle is a rendering of my name in standard Spanish spelling and phonetics. The first part is yon/John, so nuff said, hopeyfulley.)
I hope no one will ever feel pressured to declare their gender, nationality, or any other affiliation in these parts.
The OP has reminded me of a scene from something I read. It’s set in British colonial . . . somewhere. I want to say India, but my memory is vague enough that I can’t be certain even of that. Probably South Asia, but not impossible to be East Asia.
Anyway, the narrator is in a cafe or restaurant or canteen, and sees a group of British men — I think army officers — who are being served by a native. And one of the British men gets outraged and offended that the server is speaking fluent English. He snarls at the server until the server apologizes and starts speaking broken and subservient English.
I don’t think this was in anything by Kipling, although I was reading a bunch of his works twentyish years ago (David Eddyshaw’s description from Kim looked immediately familiar). But also twentyish years ago, I was reading the Flashman books. Could the scene have been from one of those?
I hope someone knows, because you’ve got me curious.
@Owlmirror: That scene sounds like something that would be perfectly at home in Kim, although I’m pretty sure that’s not the source.
There is a vignette like that in ch. 2 of George Orwell’s Burmese Days. Search on the phrase “I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now”.
Short comment because I am on the road.
I’m afraid that I didn’t find it bollocks at all. It’s a perfectly coherent worldview and, from what I can tell, accurately represents the relationship between the snooty, educated Englishman and his colonial subjects who are struggling to validate themselves.
I was struck by the expression “literate in the vernacular”, which pretty clearly does not indicate an ability to write it.
Thanks, Xerîb!
Orwell’s (or rather, Blair’s – “Orwell, George” links to “Blair, Eric Arthur”) works are at Faded Page, including Burmese Days.
That’s not the exact scene I have in mind, but it certainly displays the same spirit.
There is also the incident of Hari’s initial arrest by Merrick in The Jewel in the Crown, related by Sister Ludmila, in which Hari’s accent is contrasted with Merrick’s, and Hari is chided by an Indian policeman for speaking in such an uppity fashion to Merrick in English rather than Hindustani: And all the time in those accents so much more English even than Merrick’s.
I wonder if LH readers can think of other notable scenes like this one or the one found in Orwell’s Burmese Days. Is there any incident in 19th-century Russian literature in which the servants or the wrong class of people know French too well ? Right off the top of my head I can’t think of any scene like this in the literature of the United States, in which an enslaved person or an African-American is rebuked or assaulted for being ‘uppity’ by speaking too well. But it seems like there must be many such scenes. And records of such incidents in real life.
@Xerîb: Yer proper-English-butler characters in English-English literature demonstrate that it is possible to convey a deferential-to-subservient attitude within a hierarchical social context while using exquisitely prescriptivist syntax and lexicon. The same characters could also convey uppitiness-or-lack-of-deference by shifts in tone of voice, etc. In that context you assume the posh addressee would be able to tell the difference between the two and I suspect the same would or could (in a fictional context) work across racial lines in the U.S. I can easily imagine a black character who spoke “too well” being treated as comical, however (not least by his fellow members of the same caste).
Indeed, come to think of it Wodehouse’s Jeeves has I believe been seen as an update of the “clever slave/servant” stock character whose comic and plot-advancing possibilities have been used by writers back to Plautus and probably beyond, and I daresay you can probably find black versions of that stock character in American literature where being suprisingly-well-spoken is part of the schtick but not in context seen to unacceptably violate race-linked social norms. (Obviously the clever-servant character instead talking like a rustic/rube/simpleton to conceal his cleverness and thereby work some scheme that advances the plot is an equally legitimate angle for the author to pursue.)
There is, in U.S. non-fiction, the case of Mary Hamilton – a black woman who in an Alabama courtroom in 1963 refused to answer the prosecutor’s questions because he was addressing her by her first name when he would have by local convention certainly called her Miss Hamilton had she been white. She was held in contempt and the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately threw out the contempt charge basically on the theory that the Constitution required the prosecutor to stop being a jerk and call her Miss Hamilton if she insisted on it. So that’s insistence-on-equality being treated as uppityness, even if not exactly the same thing because it wasn’t about how she spoke versus how she demanded she be spoken to.
I daresay you can probably find black versions of that stock character in American literature where being suprisingly-well-spoken is part of the schtick
A riff on this is a major plot point in Percival Everett’s James:
@Xerîb: to me the canonical example of this trope in US literature is Lee, the Chinese butler in East of Eden
I daresay you can probably find black versions of that stock character in American literature
I haven’t read much American literature of the type where a black clever slave/servant could show up. Now I’m wondering: Are there examples from before this century? That’s not just a question for J.W.
Obv. this is late in the day and the “politics” that needed to be navigated had obviously changed somewhat significantly, but ABC television put the black-clever-servant stock character in the starring role of a prime-time sitcom starting back when I was in 9th grade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_(TV_series) (And this after the same character had played more of a supporting role in another ABC prime-time series for two previous seasons.)
Vaguely related: Monty Python’s Village Idiot:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=chfhGxnHBgI
Thanks, that’s one, though later than the Jeeves period as you say.
The Far Side and cows standing in a field, too.
“Confused? You won’t be after the next episode of SOAP!” I loved that thing as a teen/YA.
Now you’re making me want to rewatch it. (YouTube, for those who want to play along at home.)
there are occasional appearances of this dynamic in dorothy sayers between bunter and lord peter. there, to my eye it’s very much fake outrage on lord peter’s part, concealing real anxiety about violating the master/servant hierarchy, itself entwined with discomfort with that hierarchy. sayers is so fascinating in how she presents the kayfabe of residual feudalism in the post-WWI context.
I agree with your analysis of Lord Peter’s comments about Bunter’s occasional manifestations of superiority. Another interesting point is Peter’s occasional competitiveness and pulling rank with Bunter, which maybe he shouldn’t stoop to, but maybe doing so is a compliment because he feels the need to.
As for another aspect of residual feudalism,
Language point: Would it have been more U (avant la lettre) of Harriet to say “Should you like children?” I seem to recall that Fowler said that in questions, you use the shall/will or should/would form you expect in the answer.
If Fowler said that, he was wrong: as this passage nicely illustrates.
Harriet is a doctor’s daughter, who got a first in English at Oxford, presumably in the early 1920’s. It is inconceivable that her speech would be at all non-U (in that sense.)
Though, stricto sensu, what Fowler is talking about is not U or non-U: that was supposed to be a collection of linguistic shibboleths for distinguishing the middle class (like Harriet) from the upper (like Wimsey.) “Non-U” was supposed to be artificial and social-climbery, whereas yer actual porphyrogeniti, like Lord P, were supposed to be more unaffected and, in fact, more like yer salt-of-the-earth gorblimey working class in speech.
Fowler is essentially concerned with correct “middle-class” usage.
Nancy Mitford’s article-that-sparked-it-all-off is reprinted in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_Oblige_(book)
which is suprisingly entertaining, and contains an excellent letter by Evelyn Waugh which efficiently demolishes the whole concept.
@de, jf
Re jf’s point, the replacement of would with should in some formal contexts applies only to I/we. So Should you… would not be understood as the same thing, i.e., here ‘should you like children?’ means “do you think it is incumbent upon you to like children?
No, I understood that; and I myself am one of the three Brits left who still says “I shall” unaffectedly as a simple prognostication with no deontic overtones. But it’s just wrong to prescribe “Shall you do that?” as a simple future-surrogate. Nobody ever used it like that.
If Fowler said that he was being carried away by supposed “logic” (as in some other cases.)
The Fowlers wrote in The King’s English Abridged for School Use (Google Books)
At all events, I am sure that Wimsey would be magnificently unconcerned by Fowler’s prescriptions (though magnanimous and understanding toward those less fortunate than himself); and Hypergamic Harriet would surely have shaken off any linguistic anxieties of that kind by this point, assuming that she ever had any to begin with.
FWIW, Fowler there seems to be implying that Harriet’s usage is actually correct (“follow[s] the rule”) but (good man!) that it’s all pretty moot anyhow.
i think harriet is in any case a bad candidate for either U or Non-U usage – she’s very much the New Woman (post-Great-War edition; semi-bohemian subspecies), and very much neither a social climber nor an aristocrat. lord peter’s interest in her is firmly based on exactly that double negative (as well as her specific positive qualities).
All very true. (“Hypergamic” was somewhat mischievous, indeed, positively wrong: neither of the happy couple would contenance such a description for an instant, and quite right too. Lord P would certainly say – and feel – that any hypergamy going on was on his part.)
Harriet would certainly have spoken High Academic Oxonian, though, of a kind whose correctness no mere Fowler could be competent to criticise. (Unlike Harriet and her creator, he merely got a Second.)
At DE: Thanks for the correction on U.
At all events, I am sure that Wimsey would be magnificently unconcerned by Fowler’s prescriptions
He does have one moment of self-prescription that came to my mind, though I attributed it to Harriet till I looked it up. It’s in “Uncle Meleager’s Will”.
I don’t know what the objection to “So it doesn’t” is, and “Nor it does” is not part of my English., though I understand it occurs in some dialects.
As you say, Wimsey is cavalier enough to say “ain’t” and “he don’t” at times, at least in his youth, and I don’t think Miss Vane ever does.
One could study Wimsey’s Sh. versus W. when he’s being formal, as when he talks to female dons, but one isn’t going to just at present. (I was going to write “one won’t”, but I don’t think Fowler covered will/shall in the first person numeral.)
That story also has the useful line
“Bunter,” said Lord Peter, “bring me a whisky-and-soda!”
The perfectly cromulent “ain’t” was the target of opprobrium from prescriptivists in the nineteenth century, as was 3rd sg “don’t”, because that’s what People of That Sort do; actual toffs like Wimsey really did pay no attention to such silliness in their informal usage, so this was indeed a genuine case of concordance between the Speech of the Posh and gorblimeyese. Sayers will certainly have intended this feature of Lord P’s speech to be interpreted by her readers as aristocratic rather than demotic or careless: it’s a pretty familiar trope in the UK.
Interesting that this doesn’t feature in the largely factitious lists of U versus non-U features one encounters. Nancy Mitford may have picked up on it in her essay, though: she was an astute observer. Another familiar case is gerund-participles ending in /n/ rather than /ŋ/, as in “huntin’, shootin’ and fishin'” (traditionally, the core pastimes for male speakers of this sociolect.)
I think “ain’t” began as 1st sg: its banning by the language bigots has left a gap in the system. Scots say “amn’t”, but I have never heard this from an Englishperson.
I think P is uncomfortable with “so it doesn’t” because it seems to put the negation uncomfortably together with “so”; and his “correction” is actually intended to be humorously awkward. He’s playing with language.
I know the gap you’re talking about. I grew up with “Aren’t I”, maybe a correction of “Ain’t I”, but prescriptivism has spoiled it for me.
The OED has “ain’t” s.v. “be” and shows the history in the Forms tab, organized by person. The earliest is indeed 1sg, but 3sg is very close.
The first 1sg citation of something similar is
2sg:
3sg:
Plural:
On “So it doesn’t,” Wimsey certainly plays with language all the time, but I hadn’t considered your understanding of it.
On huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’, I think gender is involved in pronunciation as well as pastimes (though by the last century women of the appropriate class were certainly not excluded from the pastimes). At least in fiction, I don’t think many aristocratic women used those pronunciations.
Otto Jespersen discusses the “aren’t I” option and says that George Eliot only used it for characters who were supposed to be speaking a “vulgar” dialect but by the time of O. Wilde and H.G. Wells it was used by them in dialogue for characters who seemed to be speaking standard, although maybe in an informal register?
Scots say “amn’t”
Irish too. Stan Carey has a robust defense: Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland, citing many sources (yes, it’s in Ulysses), including a link to an early Language Hat post.
huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ … At least in fiction, I don’t think many aristocratic women used those pronunciations.
Miss Greythorne, the owner of the manor house in The Dark Is Rising, occasionally says things like “Havin’ a good Christmas?” and “Everyone doin’ a little bit”, though mixed with a larger number of ‑ing forms.
FWIW, I was taught aren’t I and discovered amn’t (as Irish) much later – I’ve never actually heard it.
Ain’t as amn’t with dropping of the m and compensatory lengthening of the a before the Great Vowel Shift really took off is an intriguing idea… maybe FACE was still [æː] in the 1667 example.
amn’t is more common in Ireland than in Scotland, as the Scots have the option of amnae in some cases.
I vaguely recall a while back a post here to a site which purported to recognise where you came from on the basis of your assessments of acceptable written usage.
To my reluctantly acknowledged surprise, it correctly diagnosed my Anglophonic origin as Scots; I think part of this was actually my ready acceptance e.g. “he’s not” as opposed to “he isn’t.” At some remove, this presumably represents “he isna” in some way.
I succumb, yet again, to the temptation to link to the slightly relevant
https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf
(The clitic-versus-flexion thing is of particular relevance in Kusaal, which is how I first came across this classic paper. Not that I actually follow its criteria in my Kusaal grammar. I’m with Haspelmath on such things …)
I think P is uncomfortable with “so it doesn’t” because it seems to put the negation uncomfortably together with “so”; and his “correction” is actually intended to be humorously awkward. He’s playing with language.
All that discussion reminds me what an extraordinarily closely observant writer Sayers is.
@JF “Nor it does” is not part of my English.
How about “Nor does it”? I agree with @DE that Sayers/Wimsey is being deliberately mischievous/self-conscious.
Ah, yes: something was tugging at my memory regarding Irish “amn’t”:
As the ghastly Haines then remarks: “We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous.”
The full version has yet more blasphemy, and its target is made clearer.
I only indulge in W/Sh stuff when flexing my better-than-thou, and as such it is supremely irrelevant what better bred gentlebeings of PDBW’s vintage would have said.
But in the bit from Uncle Meleager’s Will, I don’t know what register he’s aiming at? I was brought up religious, I was, like? I read it like So it doesn’t needs corrected because it’s too high, not because it would be a solecism among his peers. (He’s talking to his sister and her dreadfully intense friend Hannah Marryat, who I suppose are both “his own kind”).
Ain’t as amn’t with dropping of the m and compensatory lengthening of the a
that also seems like it would make sense of the relationship between “ain’t” and less-dipthong-y variations like the one usually written “en’t” (which could cover a range of vowel placements), right?
Well, pre-19th century the FACE vowel was largely monophthongal, anyway. Even during the first half of the 19th century, the evidence from orthoepists and early phonologists is contradictory — some denying any diphthongal pronunciation in educated speech, while others grudgingly allow a weak diphthongization. See Charles Jones, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries for details.
I can imagine an evolution of ain’t:—
step 1: disyllable to monosyllabic: amnt>ănt ; arent>ānt ; isnt>int [TRAP, PALM, KIT vowels respectively]
Step 2: convergence of the three vowels to a single value. The weak form is schwa; the strong form varies by individual, any vowel within the TRAP–PALM–KIT triangle possible
Step 3: standardisation of the spelling based on assuming FACE as the strong-form vowel. (Perhaps not even assuming FACE, but rather an accented PALM cf Oscar Hammerstein II: “How can I be what I ain’t? / I cain’t!”)
Was hain’t for haven’t/hasn’t attested earlier or later? The vowel would be normal Scots, I think. I could imagine leakage between hain’t and amn’t, e.g., I hain’t gone yet interpreted as I amn’t gone yet.
Having just read The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will (JF’s link had no URL), I note that one theme raised in the story was one of frivolity (in the course of finding the crossword, Wimsey made a literal faux pas and fell in the impluvium). Could it be that “nor it does” is a deliberately frivolous way to affirm an absence?
In the course of the story, Bunter asks for help with two crossword puzzles. The first was a word I’d never heard of — absace (Wikt: From Old French ambes as (“both aces”), from Latin ambo + as)(Also, noted as being archaic). At the end, though, he asks for “a South African quadruped in six letters, beginning with Q” — which struck me as being so obvious as to be odd. Were quagga really so obscure to public knowledge in that time period? Or was that perhaps yet another joke?
For some reason the syntax of Lord Peter’s “I was brought up religious, I was” makes me assume a Stage-Cockney accent, but that may just confirm the sociological point already noted above that the genuine English upper classes disdained BBC/Fowler-style prescriptivism as middle-class status-seeking and thus had usages sometimes coinciding with those of the plebes.
On that social-climbing theme, I just chanced to see an appreciation of Viv Stanshall (1943-1995) which noted that “Despite growing up in postwar London’s East End, his father made him speak with a posh accent for which he later became known.” Other sources say that he spent his later childhood and teens outside London but in not-very-posh parts of Essex, but it does seem likely that among his various teenage odd jobs he may have been the plummiest-accented bingo caller at the famous Kursaal* Fun Fair in Southend-on-Sea. But VS is separately of Hattic interest because the a-side of his first solo 45 was titled “Labio-Dental Fricative.”* Co-credit for songwriting is shared with, of all people, Eric Clapton, but I tend to assume his contributions were more focused on the guitar parts than the lyrics.
*Obviously named in honor of the Kusaal people; no doubt David E. will know why there’s a variant spelling.
**https://www.discogs.com/release/3547816-Vivian-Stanshall-Sean-Head-Showband-Labio-Dental-Fricative
David E. will know why there’s a variant spelling
It is a common misconception that the funfair is named for the African language. In fact, the name derives from the Kusaal word kursaala “smooth trousers”, adopted in honour of the garb characteristic of the habitués (and, indeed, much favoured by the male inhabitants of Saafind in general.)
Sigh. And the word was so unfamiliar to me that I didn’t recognize that I’d misspelled it.
It’s “ambsace”, not what I wrote just above.
Possible, but it gets even better: the START vowel is a rather newfangled development. Benjamin Franklin didn’t have one: as far as can be told from the not terribly precise transcription he devised, are was stressed [æɹ], unstressed [ɛɹ] to him (TRAP, DRESS).
So, amn’t and aren’t could have fallen together as [æːnt] directly, and that could have been interpreted as FACE and developed accordingly.
I am glad that my proneness to common misconceptions (Essex funfair subdivision) has created an opportunity for David E. to make us all better-informed.
Another instance when the use of amn’t (spelled “am’n’t” in the script) emphasizes a character’s Irishness comes from The Crying Game. There are some doubts about whether Stephen Rea’s character is going to be willing to murder Forrest Whittaker if he’s told to, and Rea has the indignant response: “I’m a volunteer, am’n’t I?”