Make a Left or Take a left?

My colleague, Charubala, who steers the language division of our little company, can talk endlessly on language. Her interest in observing how English is used by people of different generations, nationalities, backgrounds is very engaging. I will share a few nuggets with you here today.

One trend she observes in American users- people who like to simplify English and bring more logic to its confusing syntax, grammar and sentence structure- are the most forward in ‘verbing’. In our language programmes we encourage people to use verb forms of words to shorten sentences. The American users have taken it way forwards and made verbs of nouns that never existed when English for us meant British English. We all already know and often use ourselves, words like ‘access’ and ‘extract’ as verbs, even though they continue to shock classical users. So we now say, “I can access this data easily.” The classical use would be “I can have access to this data easily.” When I was in school I was taught that ‘extract’ could be a verb when talking of say, juice. You can extract juice from sugarcane but you couldn’t say that a poem is ‘extracted’ from a book. You had to say, “This poem is an extract from the book…” That’s obviously changed. Younger people may even be surprised to hear about such ‘primitive’ uses of words.

Some of the newer verbs she has been reading about are ‘helm’, ‘chagrin’, and strangely, ‘reverence’. So sentences from American publications and newsletters can read like “He helms this company.”/ “I was chagrined to hear about the delay.” / Today is reverenced as SuperBowl Day.

So then is there anything like wrong English? Languages undergo changes with changing social scenarios and shifting economic power. If the language is used alternately by an economic superpower, it is seen and recorded as a ‘change’ in the language. So we recognise American English as different from British English and then there’s Australian. The spelling too varies and an Indian language professional needs to know both the variants. But Americans can barely recognise British spelling and British users don’t enjoy American spelling. They like to use ‘programme’ and ‘colour’ and ‘manoeuvre’ among a myriad other words. Indian English, with its sheer growth and significance, has established itself in the literary world though business place English in India is largely American. But in India we tend to use a mix of British and American spelling, quite unknowingly. So most Indian users prefer ‘program’ but yet choose to use ‘neighbour’ instead of ‘neighbor’. We use ‘forward’ instead of the British ‘forwards’ but interestingly we use ‘backwards’ like the British do. So an Indian speaker will say, “Let’s take this discussion forward.” But he is most likely to say, “Let’s not move backwards.”

And amidst all this, how do we look at it if users of non-English speaking countries use English differently? Well, that certainly is counted as a mistake. Don’t you agree?