THE CHURCHILL LECTURE

The text of my talk at a recent dinner to commemorate Winston Churchill.

BBC Language Adviser

Britain has won crucial battles such as Blenheim, Trafalgar and the Battle of Britain more through intellectual force than by bravery: raw courage with mediocrity leading is unlikely to get a famous victory if on the other side there is intellectual excellence in the person of its commander.

The paramount ingredient of that intellectual excellence is as common to top-class military minds as it is to those of science, business and politics. It shows clearly in Marlborough, Nelson and Dowding; and in Newton, Bill Gates and Winston Churchill. It is precision in Language. So Churchill spoke for our language:

“I would make all boys learn English, - and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that”

Winston Churchill

Bear in mind that Churchill was measuring his public school fellows, i.e. those at the top of the education ladder in late Victorian and Edwardian times. Were he now to see the standard of English, not at bog standard schools, but at the top institutions of British higher education that in the past helped raised this country to world leadership in literature and science; that V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize for Literature and sparkling graduate of Oxford, advised parents in the Far East not to send their children to England to learn English; that a distinguished teacher at Imperial College, in an article in the Sunday Telegraph gave examples of poor English from some of his native students, and indicated that his foreign students, schooled abroad, had a better grasp of English grammar, punctuation and word meaning than some of his British students, (you can’t get into Imperial College without very good exam results), - I think that Churchill’s anger would not be directed at the youngsters, but at school officials who over two generations have tolerated disgracefully low standards at primary and secondary levels.

In order to support my argument, which I shall give later, for an effective language- advising facility to be installed in the BBC, I quote another person who, like Churchill, is far from political correctness. Any current politician or after- dinner speaker giving the following utterance as his own would draw sneers. Asked what he would undertake first, were he called upon to rule a nation, Confucius replied:

“To correct language. If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if morals and art deteriorate, justice will go astray, and the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything”.

Indeed, language is our chief tool, or rather box of tools, with some precision tools, some others implements of immense emotional power. If such special words are blunted, our culture becomes less adept in its thinking and, as Confucius saw, then a whole enfeebled social edifice slips downwards to greater and greater inefficiency. Our British computer fiascos would not have surprised him. He would have discerned that it was not the computers’ fault but the humans using them who, because of their modern English-speaking education were ill-equipped in English to manage any vast technological power. (I say ‘English-speaking’ because what ails us here is rife in all English-speaking countries). Hence the following argument for putting a language adviser into the BBC.

It is said that there is nothing new under the sun. Untrue! Until well into the 20th century there was no Electronic Broadcasting for the sun to shine on. Never before was there an engine that could, from the mouth of one ignoramus, abruptly switch the long-established meaning of a word over an entire country. Printing never could, because the seen word lacks the unconscious flash of the heard one even if it is in a newspaper read that day by millions: printing can never wield the vast instant sweep of a national oral broadcast. (If I may, I shall instance the change of a vital meaning at question time).

In former times the words heard from those greatest influencers of English, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, were broadcast generation after generation by an educated clergy that stuck to the text. Thus, though English changed gradually over generations, educated people were still in tune with any author from Shakespeare to
P.G. Wodehouse; and the populace of any dialect-district were never deaf to the finest English, because they heard it from those two masterpieces in church and graveyard; and most children, long before they could read, knew nursery rhymes and fairy tales that were English classics. And they knew them from home, long before they entered nursery-school.

Now that radio and television are the predominant cultural influencers, BBC English, even from its sport-commentators, should always be a good example. This is my simple system to help it be that. It is so simple that it can be set out in four short pointers:

i. The language adviser in Broadcasting House would have knowledge of the English language at least equal to mine. There are many, many in this kingdom with English better than mine.

ii. The language adviser would be fed from a reservoir of a hundred carefully chosen unpaid monitors. A good number of these would be drawn from the USA and the other English-speaking countries- and from Hong Kong and the Indian subcontinent, where the BBC has listeners who treasure English and are adept in it.

iii. Monitors would connect with the language adviser, never with the broadcaster. Their connection would be by a simple rigid process. Each monitor would have English at least equal to mine.

iv. Comment or criticism from the language adviser would be private to the broadcaster, citing his utterance, and giving a suggested improvement. The broadcaster would always be free to comment or discuss.

With this system the BBC would start a national regeneration.

QUEST
No. 101 The Journal of The Queen’s English Society