27Apr“Imperially”

I’ve just finished another book (some of you may wonder how I get time to work!), this one a personal memoir of Winston Churchill*, and it contained a very interesting quote from the great man: “… to think imperially, which means always to think of something higher and more vast that one’s own national interests.”

I thought that a very interesting definition of “imperially”; most people would define it along the lines of ”having to do with acquiring and exploiting dependent territories” (thanks to the Penguin English Dictionary for that one).  Churchill obviously thought it was a much higher and greater thing.  He was, of course, a great believer in the British Empire and a master of the English language in a rather orotund way.  Some of his utterances make one think of Disraeli’s comment about Gladstone: “…inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity”.  You can imagine him rolling the words over his tongue like a fine brandy, or the Pol Roger champagne he so loved.

English is, by any definition, one of the (if not the) richest and subtlest language(s) in the world.  It isn’t governed by any Academy trying to keep it “pure”, so it absorbs from other languages, alters and re-invents itself constantly.  Words are minted, they go in and out of fashion, pronunciations change (what we now call a balcony used to be a balcony, which is appropriate since we pinched the word from the Italian balcone).  Britain and America may be “divided by a common language” but English is still - on the whole – understandable on both sides of the pond.  It has given us the greatest, most lively, prose and poetry literature in the world, from all over the world.

It is also one of the hardest languages to learn, I’m told.  There are so many nuances, variants, homonyms and the opposite - words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently, like though/through/trough (and if anyone knows the word for that, I’d love to hear from you).  Phrasal verbs are apparently a minefield: Amazon has no fewer than 636 books about them on sale at the moment.  Sentences that appear to mean one thing turn out to mean the opposite – and that’s before you start on sarcasm and irony. 

If you grew up speaking and reading English as your first language, give thanks.  Unless of course you’re trying to learn Polish – I gather it’s even worse!

* Through Winds and Tides by Colin Thornton-Kemsley, Standard Press, Montrose, 1974.