All the way…

Those of us who remember the era of our involvement in the Vietnam War would scarcely forget Prime Minister Harold Holt's fawning declamation to President Lyndon Johnson, "We're with you all the way, LBJ", as he sought to escalate our involvement in that campaign.

This kowtowing to United States influence not only underscored the cementing of diplomacy, but also seemed to firm up an existing adoption of American expressions.

For many years we had been going all the way towards adopting their phraseology, accent, and speech habits in a form of cultural subservience which overtook many Australian idioms and terminologies.

In song, here has always been a tendency to Americanise the way various words are uttered.

This may have been due to the enormous amount of popular entertainment coming from the good old U.S of A., but many a time I have winced in sadness as I hear Australian singers in particular, croon about "Mah lerv for you". These utterances are sometimes by Aboriginal performers, a group which owes no cultural allegiance to any other nation than the one to which they belong, unfortunately not always proudly.

There is also an increased ritualistic habit amongst many people of pronouncing the first person pronoun, "I", as "Ar". Why? Is it caution at the risk of pronouncing it "OI"?

As yet, we do not draw our water from the faucet, stroll down the sidewalk, fill our automobiles with gasoline, or put diapers on our babies. A peanut butter and jam sandwich is exactly that – not peanut butter and jelly.

Yes, we certainly do have our own distinct national terms and phrases which we have adopted from the mainly Anglo origins of our first white settlers.

Slang was an evident aspect of this early language growth, particularly rhyming slang. Also the ability to express ourselves in what has evolved into a particularly Aussie style which uses laconic, indirect comment to describe events.

Examples could be the description of a wind as "strong enough to blow a brown dog of his chain", or the answer to the question "Getting' any?" as: "Yeah – so much I've had to put a man on."

Why do we ape the American stylists? Is it because our own culture seems inadequate, leaving us feeling culturally inferior?

There is the undeniable fact that in comparison to the majority of Australian schoolkids, their American counterparts speak more fluently and cogently,

This may be because our declining standards of English grammar, comprehension, and expression, have been the outcome of a radical move some decades back to change English teaching methods.

There is strong evidence of this on the part of those who really should be able to communicate properly and accurately – young television and radio journalists who seem unable to string words together correctly as they struggle to express a thought or describe an event, very often making flawed grammatical construction the norm, and by linguistic osmosis, skewing their audiences towards incorrect usage.

Then there are clichés, those convenient shortcuts around properly structured, swiftly expressed, ideas. Clichés are not solely Australian in nature, but their use is probably because of shortcomings in our own language study and teaching.

Perhaps our sphere of education is a little smaller than that of the perceived epitome of word use, the United States.

What about the subtleties and nuances of U.K.English? It has a verbalisation form which is difficult for many other world languages to emulate.

I have a keen interest in languages, thanks to my high school years where I was fortunate to have teachers who enjoyed applying their excellence in Latin, French, German and splendidly in English, to awaken the researcher in me.

I studied enthusiastically, discovering not only the grammatical structure of the language I was learning, but also reinforcing my evaluation of English syntax. As well, it opened my understanding of the cultural bases on which other languages are formed.

I am enjoying a similar process now as I learn Mandarin, with its vast malleability of tonal changes signifying different expressions, but also the historic form on which is built written characters.

Yet I wonder how fellow Mandarin students would cope with the proposition of the changes of meaning and perception conveyed by the grammar and tonal expression possibilities in the phraseology of Cole Porter's memorable melody, "What Is This Thing Called Love?"

That clever American left open the use of inflection and pausation to express this song title as:

What … Is this thing called love?

What is this thing called, love?

What? Is this THING called love?

What IS this thing called love?

What is THIS thing called, love?

And so on as the nuances nibble at expression after expression.

Our local way of speaking, our lingua franca (or better still, our lingo) is developing as our multicultural mix grows. We could yet develop terms and phrases which are uniquely our own, and do not lend to pronunciation determinacy by the Untied States.

We have our own unique culture and ways of vocalising it; this should reduce any feelings of inadequacy by those of us who feel the need to speak like quasi Americans.

We don't have to go All The Way.

No way!