U Wot, M8?
An English town abandons the apostrophe.
To soothe my teetering mental health, I've abandoned British news. Nigerian news may not provide what one expects from news—the flooding in Jigawa won't tickle my British toes—but neither is Nigerian news a suicide note revealed in nightly instalments. British news is just that.
Yes, Nigeria has its problems. A litre of petrol costs three times what it cost just nine months ago. The price of staples such as rice has more than doubled.
President Bola Tinubu's reforms haven't helped matters. Inflation hovers at 30 percent. Food prices have punched holes in the roof. In the north, many Nigerians resort to poor waste rice usually reserved for fish food. That's not to mention the endemic mortal troubles such as terrorism, corruption, poverty, and the rest. President Tinubu says pain today is prosperity tomorrow.
Despite a list of advantages as long as its list of disadvantages, some analysts believe Nigeria—oil and resource rich—could emerge as the 'Black China.' A youthful nation, the emigres of which are America's most successful minority, Nigeria has implacable potential. Are those well-wrought agonies the mere birth pangs of a future superpower? I don't know.
What I do know is that when one clicks the channel over to Arise News, a clerical, purposeful anchor named Ndee Amaugo wears both a tie and Gordon Gekko belt suspenders. He's surrounded by clerical, purposeful guests. They're unafraid and unembarrassed to know their brief and to express that brief. There's no notion of wearing one's knowledge lightly.
The majority on-screen talk in an adapted form of BBC English. BBC English is that cut-glass accent alleged to dissolve American female resolve. (Or so I am told.) Cast away as a relic of the oppressive past, BBC English was the accent of a more serious nation.
Dissolving my resolve is a north Yorkshire council's exercise in linguistic pederasty. Oop Norf, as the caricature goes, they're dropping the apostrophe on all new street signs. St Mary's Walk is now St Marys Walk. Why? Something to do with computers.
The council said they're merely uprooting the punctuational foundations of the world's most spoken and richest language because… fuck you—that's why.
Bob McCalden, president of the Apostrophe Protection Society, told me that the council's caper amounted to 'cultural vandalism.'
"Many road names in the UK have a good deal of history attached to them. Dropping the apostrophe from St Mary's Walk ignores the history behind the name. We should acknowledge and celebrate our social history, and not try to erase it."
Locals in Harrogate told the BBC what for. Anne Keywood said: "I think we should be using apostrophes. If you start losing things like that, then everything else goes downhill, doesn't it?"
If only Ms Keywood's acute observation appealed to academics at the University of Essex. Recently, they coined a tiresome new ism. Linguism is a form of prejudice. To correct another's speech or grammar is to encircle them in chains.
Those same academics expressed their thoughts in clear grammatical sentences. No doubt they ensured their PhD theses flowed logically and scrubbed them clean of errors and typos. Of course, they ensure their children express themselves clearly and grammatically as they follow them toward the upper reaches of British society.
There's a strain of sub-Marxist thinking informing this general revulsion toward any and all standards. This intellectual adolescence presses itself into the skulls of schoolkids around age 12. At its heart beats a reflexive dismissal of standards or hierarchy.
The thinking behind such a movement is poxed and suppurating. Standards suggest better or worse. By their very nature, standards are exclusionary. Therefore, all standards are engines of oppression. I was a teenaged anarchist, too.
I get it. Not so long ago, Great Britain was riddled with the tumours of an unjust, mummified idea which insisted one should know one's place in the natural order. To adhere to such social apartheid was to be its capo. From these historical traumata springs the irrational fear of standards and excellence.
Only in the realms of sport do we accept thoughtlessly the fact some are more suited or capable than others. An Olympic gold-medallist is born to achieve what 99.9 percent could never achieve. But to suggest one thing or behaviour is better than another is social heresy.
In France, the Immortals of Académie Française meet every Thursday afternoon to fine-comb the French language. Their mission is to ensure the French language remains 'pure and elegant.'
The forty members, garbed in ducal robes, and with ceremonial swords dangling from their belts, resemble the Lords of Britain's second chamber. In often weekly pronouncements, they parse and preach. The wording of those pronouncements reads as if deigned from Mount Olympus.
The Immortals have met since Cardinal Richelieu's foundation in 1635. They're comically serious. The Académie Française is the Taliban of the French language. Its 'denouncements' are a regular feature of French culture. These fatwas often slice through corruptions they term 'Californisms.'
A typical report reads like an inquisition. "Today's communication is characterised by a degradation that must not be seen as inevitable," goes a typical sentence.
The Immortals talk of a "pure" French. To Académie Française, the French language is a great oak encircled by arsonists and loggers.
You'd assume the Immortals were a band of blood-and-soil lunatics, the kind one encounters on Twitter thirsting over fictitious trad wives. Non! The ordinary French person may humour the Immortals' starchy implorations. The French call email 'mail' rather than the academy's preferred courriel or message electronique. A Friday afternoon in Paris chirps in unison: Bonne weekend! Only in the academy's regal Institut de France would one hear the preferred bonne fin de semaine. Â
And yet, the French are intensely proud of and protective of their culture. Everywhere you look are the words, Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Those haughty doses of elitism trickle down from the Académie Française. En route, they dilute into a palatable tonic. Most French cheerfully disregard academy proclamations. That said, the French know the academy, militant and starchy though it may be, means well.
They know, too, that the little things make up the big things. They know standards matter. The Nigerians know that. We used to know that, too.
"Suicide note in nightly instalments..." love that, absolute classic 👌 and apt description of the mess we're in....
Love this week's post! I confess I thought at first you made up the Apostrophe Protection Society, but I should know you Brits better.