Frying the flag

There's an amusing story called Frying the Flag in Lawrence Durrell's Esprit de Corps, Sketches from Diplomatic Life. It's about two elderly British ladies, Bessie and Enid Grope, who ran a newspaper called The Central Balkan Herald. They claimed in a headline that the paper "keeps the British flag frying". "A whole generation of Serbs have had their English mauled by the Herald," an English diplomat complains.
The paper was hand-set by "half-a-dozen hirsute Serbian peasants with greasy elf-locks and hands like shovels". Every morning, diplomats, ex-pats and others gnashed their teeth, sighed, groaned, cursed, but there was nothing to be done. "Mrs Schwartkopf has cast off clothes of every description and invites inspection." "Queen of Holland Gives Panty for Ex-Servicemen."
We probably don't have hirsute Serbian peasants composing (if that's the word) our papers. We have high-tech this and that, plenty of money, plush surroundings for editors and staff, but somehow we don't seem to do better than Bessie and Enid Grope. And there are very few editors who will gnash their teeth, sigh, groan and curse when the paper is full of errors, clich��s, and just plain junk.
Why are the police always "tight-lipped?" Why is a heart-attack always "massive?" It would have to be wouldn't it, if the person died? And why have we been doing this "since years?" Alternatively, why have we been doing this "till date"?
I think it's partly our capacity for delusion. We have decided we know English, and have nothing to learn. TV anchors and reporters mispronounce words with abandon. I'm always amazed by their confidence. Speak to someone in Hindi, and he or she, offended, will reply in English, sort of. Sometimes people I know a little ask me why they were refused a job in a call-centre, for instance. They had been told by their teachers that their English was fine. I tell them it's fine too, at which point they persist. Finally, I'm forced to say there may be one or two small problems, nothing major, easily remedied. At which point they walk away in a huff.
Mistake became, as they say in these parts. Mistake indeed became. What we like to think of as Indian English, or Hinglish, or Pinglish and so forth is not really a language. It's merely Hindi, Marathi or whatever translated literally, with no grasp of the fact that English has a different set of rules about structure, pronunciation, parts of speech. Hence, symBOL , pisTOL atMOSphere. Hence, "Are you going for work or simbly?" "Simbly." And, of course, all those old chestnuts: snakes in hole, hothot, oneone.
So no, that is not the Empire striking back. Post-colonial academics like to think it is, and if you don't agree you're a fossil. But it's only writers who are fluent in a language who can play around with it in the way that G V Desani did in All About H Hatterr, or Rushdie did in several of his works. It isn't easy. Think what a mess Amitav Ghosh made in his Sea of Poppies.
What we are dealing with most of the time is just plain lack of awareness. Lack of awareness in the way language is taught (and we want children to learn three!), of the way text-books for children are edited, and of the purpose for which we want to teach English. An English which is contemporary and functional. Not passages from Shakespeare, not poems by Donne, not Chaplin's autobiography, not adverbial and adjectival clauses. How does one teach adverbial clauses to a child from the slums who has never heard a single sentence spoken in English?
I don't think anything will change till we become more realistic about our language capabilities and our goals in teaching a particular language. To date, (please not 'till date') we haven't a clue. "We fluent you in English" reads a signboard for an English-language school. After 150 years or more of jawing about the English language. It's time to pull our socks up, get our act together, sell our TVs, stop reading the papers, and have a massive heart attack.
Take heart! Bessie and Enid Grope had to stop editing their paper when Yugoslavia was invaded. But someone recommended them for the MBE for "distinguished services to the British Way of Life". Both sisters were in tears when they received the honour. What they didn't know was that one of the suffering diplomats composed a possible headline: Sisters Roasted in Punk Champage After Solemn Investitute."
Their errors live on. A young Serb visiting London wrote that it was an emotional moment when he heard Big Bun striking. He was also present at the "drooping of the colour".
The writer, who retired as head of the English Literature department at St Xavier's College, Mumbai, doesn't have a taste for English flavoured with asafetida