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Review
by Dylan Perera
The review below appeared in the Sri Lankan Sunday Times
Plus on 2 March 2008.
Click here to read the reply by
Dilini Algama published on 23 March 2008. Also see
the comments by Indi on the blog: http://www.indi.ca/2008/03/sri-lankan-english/
Witty, but an exercise of little value?
A Dictionary of Sri Lankan English, by Michael Meyler
Reviewed by Dylan Perera
Sunday Times Plus 02/03/2008
As I settled down to flick through Michael Meyler’s ‘A Dictionary
of Sri Lankan English’, I recalled the old adage: “the sun
never set on the British Empire because God would not trust an Englishman
in the dark”.
That might seem an unkind a thought to harbour against Mr. Meyler, who
comes across as the archetypical Englishman littered through the pages
of literature and history; that enchanting breed of men who boldly circled
the globe obsessively collecting and collating bits and bobs of everything
from fossils in Patagonia to bird life in the Kurdish marshes. An intense
and self-effacing subspecies that appears to derive meaning from life
by meticulous note-taking and careful filing of minutiae in the backwaters
of beyond, all too easily consigned to the backwaters until they are discovered.
Take the case of Mr. Meyler’s compatriot who spent several decades
observing and noting the numbers and behaviour of some species of butterflies
in South England. That corpus, for years dismissed as an eccentric’s
hobby, now provides a trawl of evidence for scientists on the impact of
climate change on the biosphere. If you have an affinity towards O’Brian
or Le Carre, it is not difficult to spy shades of a constant gardener
or ship surgeon.
It is hard to accuse Mr. Meyler of unseeming haste considering the prolix
20 years he has taken over this book. However several objections to Mr.
Meyler’s project spring to mind.
Firstly, there is the issue of this idea of these various English speaking
peoples. It is really a political idea rather than the linguistic one.
Is there a difference? Yes, in the sense that there exists a number of
literate users wishing to promote and legitimise, or at least define its
existence in a special way and elevate its essential provincialism. Black
American English spoken in the ‘hood’ has seen a vibrant and
explosive growth of the English language. However, in the absence of literati
with the means to legitimise its formal existence the slang of the hood
remains the slang of the hood, and makes its way into common usage by
way of lyrics and film. How come we hear not about Welsh English (they
are all Indians in disguise anyway), Irish, Scottish English?
In fact slang is a subversive evolution of the language. At its best it
has wit, imagination and artistry. The metaphysical poets’ mad wrestling
with disparate ideas is not very different from the layers of connotation
from which cockney rhyming slang draws meaning. The slang of the higher
classes has a better chance of survival. In fact, it passes under the
more respectable nomenclature of word-coinage.
For instance, ‘collateral damage’, ‘sound bite’
and ‘spin doctor’ are slang, in the same way a ‘hurrah
boat’ is a pleasure cruiser and a ‘calorific mama’ is
a young woman of particularly high sexual attraction. In that sense Sri
Lankan English is to my mind wholly insipid. It does not create or evolve
language in a deliberate manner. It can seldom, if ever, convey a commonly
accepted meaning or experience with new clarity or adroitness. Dr. Dushyanti
Mendis introducing the book at the launch (in one of the most elegantly
crafted over-the-shoulder speeches this writer has heard in a long time)
almost hastened to add that Sri Lankans do abandon Sri Lankan English
in formal speech. Almost conceding, I suspect, that this creation took
place on the wrong side of the bed. Its antecedents instead lie in lazy
expression, plain ignorance and outdated colonial slang. Hence in dressing
up this bat (slang for a night woman that flits from one trick to the
next) as a calorific mama one feels is legitimising the usage of sloppy
language.
Through their respective dictionaries, Johnson and Webster formalized
an existing word-stock that was already used in a complex and sophisticated
discourse. Which begs the question, what discourse takes place in Sri
Lankan English to really elevate it thus?
We do not, for instance, use any Sri Lankan English in our politics for
instance …. Apart from referring to one’s foes as “against
karayo”. The net value of Sri Lankan English is debatable and most
people would think it is linked to the Sri Lanka rupee and has been falling
steadily since the ’60s. And if that is the case then radio DJs
are surely the central bankers of language. Which is not to devalue Mr
Meyler's work. After all Pluto is no longer a planet but sky watchers
still watch it. And Meyler does invest the book with his own quite personal
charm. He has picked up an impressive variety of Sri Lankanisms. Take
‘catcher’ for instance, an indispensable part of Sri Lankan
urban life. Do you get ‘catchers’ in other parts of the world....
if so I wonder if they have that particularly Sri Lankan air of slight
insouciance and the element of disapproval which Meyler rightly captures.
There are, of course, too many Sinhala words. Govigama for instance –
yes, we all known it is a caste but the cognoscenti of caste will invariably
and discreetly locate chaps for being army (govigama) navy (karave) or
air force (durawe) or smugly inquire whether so and so is Carrington or
Washington. Perhaps Meyler is innocent of this nastier but pervasive part
of Sri Lanka English. One also wonders what is particularly Sri Lankan
about words such as electorate, rag or fillip to justify their inclusion.
Or bafflement as to why elocution class is Sri Lankan. I recall some Muriel
Spark short story where a respectable girl without means earned a living
giving elocution classes (it wasn’t a euphemism), and can’t
help thinking Meyler tends to sit in the wings as a slightly patronising
arbitrator benchmarking Sri Lankanisms against a British Standard English
(BSE) most familiar to him. And if you’re fussy about taxonomy you
might well fuss at his definition of polecat which is really a Civet (Paradoxurus
hermaphroditus hermaphroditus for the truly nitpicky). But who can possibly
fault him on his fabulous range of reference? And that really is the charm
and strength of his achievement -- 14 references for Polecat alone.
And he is admirably sensitive to subtle shifts of meaning. The word shrewd
for instance in BSE, as he calls it, suggests a clear head for calculated
risk, whereas Sri Lankans invariably use it as “crafty, cunning
and scheming” as he puts it. Then there are the genuine bits of
illumination like body-parts and face-cut. Sri Lankan use of the word
slowly is a gem. … “to slowly tell” meaning “to
quietly tell”. One of Meyler’s tangential achievements is
that Mirisgala gives a very good insight about Sri Lanka.
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080302/Plus/plus000018.html
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