Saturday Extra

One of Australia's best known legal eagles has written a fascinating work that really exposes the quirks and curiosities of the English language.

Transcript

Geraldine Doogue: .My last guest this morning is one of Australia's foremost barristers, as well as being a passionate advocate of human rights, particularly in relation to the rights of refugees. But what you may not know about Julian Burnside QC, is that he's also a philologist, a student of words. Hardly surprising, you might say, given his chosen profession. The secret, he says, is to be obsessed with words without becoming pedantic, without becoming a curmudgeon, like another famous philologist, who got Julian going, it turns out, in the first place. And before I welcome Julian into the studio, let's hear from his hero, Henry Higgins.

SONG: 'Why Can't the English'

Geraldine Doogue: .Of course. Rex Harrison in the famous role as Henry Higgins in 'My Fair Lady' based on George Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion', and which I grew up with and can absolutely recite I'm afraid to say. It turns out Julian Burnside was fascinated with Henry Higgins, just as I was, and he's put this in his foreword to 'Field Note from an Amateur Philologist', the book he's written about the history and development of the English language. And I can tell you, it's a fascinating work, it's just lovely. It really exposes the quirks and the curiosities of our complex and at times perplexing language. Julian Burnside, welcome.

Julian Burnside: .Good morning.

Geraldine Doogue: .So you grew up with Henry Higgins too, did you?

Julian Burnside: .I did. The stage play came out in 1956 I think, so I was six or seven at the time, and just beginning to discover the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler's Modern English Usage, and my father was interested in words, and so it all came together at the right time.

Geraldine Doogue: .Now of course Henry Higgins was a fiction, but he was based on a real 19th century philologist called Henry Sweet?

Julian Burnside: .Henry Sweet, that's right. He was much more crusty than Higgins. Higgins was sort of polished down.

Geraldine Doogue: .We all adored the benign Rex Harrison.

Julian Burnside: .Awfully chauvinistic, I mean much more in retrospect than we recognised at the time I think, although in any event Henry Sweet was a very crusty individual apparently, and Shaw makes the point in his preface to 'Pygmalion' that he needed a hero who was a philologist because he, Shaw, was in despair about the state of the English language and the way it was spelt and so on. It's a rare thing, isn't it, to have a highly successful Broadway musical, and then a film, about a philologist, it's amazing.

Geraldine Doogue: .Well of course I thought it was about a romance.

Julian Burnside: .Well of course, yes it is, but you can't escape the bit about language, can you?

Geraldine Doogue: .But what is it - because you did go back to George Bernard Shaw, I didn't, I just stayed with the musical. But words for him, as it does for you, mean more than just a passing fancy, doesn't it?

Julian Burnside: .Yes, English is a fascinating language, and there are a couple of dimensions to it that appeal to me particularly. One obvious one is that if language is misused, well then people will falsify their meaning. And George Orwell spoke about this very powerfully in 1984. But beyond the important political aspects of language is the sheer pleasure of it. And that's what 'My Fair Lady' did for me, it's just the joy of exploring this rich, bizarre, strange mongrel beast called English.

Geraldine Doogue: .Look, in a sense, as I said, the philologist walks the line between a passion for words and their correct meaning, and plain old pedantry. You must run the risk, as a barrister, of branding people in that way?

Julian Burnside: .Oh no, I don't think so. I mean if I can use language to my advantage in my work, of course I'll do it, that's my job. But outside my work, if I hear someone say something which is grammatically incorrect or a misuse of a word, I'll listen with interest and make a mental note that that's interesting, but I certainly won't tick them off, because if you lie in wait for people to make mistakes in language and then pounce on them, you do a disservice to the language, because that person will ever after be fearful of speaking in case someone else attacks them. And that's no good.

Geraldine Doogue: .You don't want to sit here and get the letters I get.

Julian Burnside: .Look, I know. But they're an interesting group, people who are interested in language. Right now the paperback edition of the book has just come out with nine extra essays in it, but the hardback edition came out two years ago. And I got lots of letters from people, all of them lovely and kind and generous saying typically the introductory paragraphs would be 'Very much enjoyed the book, loved reading it', blah-blah-blah, and then, 'I just thought that perhaps on page such-and-such you might have meant this or that or the other', or 'You may not have realised that such-and-such was a previous meaning'. Marvellous. So generous in their comments, but ready to correct.

Geraldine Doogue: .Quite. I just wondered whether you notice the difference between the way people will write and the way they'll speak. People don't talk about this a lot, but there are two people I've heard, if I think about it in my life: Barry Humphries and Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prizewinner, recently who wrote 'March' who when they speak at a literary lunch or something, you could transcribe it literally every comma and semicolon and fullstop. It was absolutely perfect. That's a very rare skill. I suppose that must be a very tidy mind, totally aligned with the ability to produce the words that are needed.

Julian Burnside: .Yes, it's a rare skill and one which I'm afraid I don't have.

Geraldine Doogue: .Well maybe you do have it.

Julian Burnside: .Well I don't think I do.

Geraldine Doogue: .Maybe many barristers probably would I suppose.

Julian Burnside: .No, no, if you've read as many transcripts as I've read, transcripts of court proceedings -

Geraldine Doogue: .Of yourself.

Julian Burnside: .Yes, specially of yourself, that's the barrister's nightmare. But speech is a different register. The way we write is one thing, the way we speak is something else, and we use different speech registers according to circumstances. The way you speak in court is different from the way you'll speak at a party with friends or over the breakfast table. And a lot of interest in language lies in finding the difference between registers. So slang is a very interesting register, where you see language developing in quite different directions and a different rate.

Geraldine Doogue: .What about Latin, the precursor of all this? Have you been similarly interested in Latin, and do you see this variety of scope that is available in English?

Julian Burnside: .No. I did two years of Latin at school because it was compulsory, and I've learnt a little bit of Latin vocabulary because of my interest in English, because obviously if you're interested in the meaning of words, you will eventually trace them back to Latin or Greek or Anglo Saxon origins. But you see, the Latin thing is a bit of a furphy in English I think. In the 17th and 18th centuries the English grammarians made grammar a growth industry, and they wanted to regularise English and turn it into a perfect language. And so they started off with the premise that it should be based on a perfect language, and Latin was the one they chose. Now there was a lot of Latin origins in English words because of the Norman Invasion, but the first great attempt at regularising English was Skinner's work, written in Latin! A book about the English language for English speakers, written in Latin! And he tried to propound all the rules of English based on the rules of Latin.

Geraldine Doogue: .They're the Brits for you.

Julian Burnside: .Well yes. And that's where we get the business about the split infinitive from, which sort of haunts and bedevils people.

Geraldine Doogue: .Is it?

Julian Burnside: .The rule was, you must not split an infinitive, because in Latin you didn't split an infinitive. Of course in Latin, infinitive for a single word, they couldn't be split, it was nonsense to say you could split them. Where the infinitive is two words, the rule makes rather less sense.

Geraldine Doogue: .And now that's been abandoned anyway, at least our Standing Committee on Spoken English says we don't have to worry about that any more.

Julian Burnside: .That's right. 'To boldly split infinitives that have never been split before.'

Geraldine Doogue: .I'll just pick out a couple in various chapters, and gorgeous chapters. Irony. Now I had an editor in London who used to really rail against the misuse of 'irony', the word 'irony', particularly the adjective 'ironic'. Now do you want to tackle that?

Julian Burnside: .Well, yes. For a start people often use 'irony' incorrectly and I don't cavil at it, because you understand what they mean.

Geraldine Doogue: .What, that it's usually 'paradox' they're getting at?

Julian Burnside: .Yes, they usually mean something that's apparently contradictory, in particular contradictory to experience, in which case they do mean 'paradoxical'.

Geraldine Doogue: .Well you say for instance, 'So it's been observed that it was "ironic" that Shane Warne's mother gave him the fluid tablet which got him into trouble that time.' Or 'It's ironic that bushfires in New South Wales were followed by flash-flooding.' That's actually not the correct use of 'ironic'.

Julian Burnside: .No, that's paradoxical, because you're seeing things that fit oddly together when judged against ordinary experience. 'Ironic' comes originally from Greek drama; there was a stock character called 'Eiron' who was constantly set up against Alazon. Now Alazon was vain and self-opinionated, and Eiron tended to be rather modest and self-deprecating, and was much smarter than he'd let people know. Now the audience realised this, but Alazon never realised it, so the audience see that what Eiron is doing is much cleverer than it seems, Alazon doesn't see it. And so the essential feature of irony is that there is embedded in the situation, an additional layer of knowledge not known to one of the participants. And so what Alazon does or what Eiron says is seen as ironic when judged against greater knowledge, viewing the thing from outside.

Geraldine Doogue: .Let's go to the chapter, 'Idle Rubbish', which was very full and rich. Why did you decide to highlight this?

Julian Burnside: .Well English is curious; we have words for things that you would never think needed to be expressed. We have an absence of words for some things which we do need. For example, schadenfreude, a word we've borrowed from the German in order to express an idea that we all recognise, but we don't have an English word for it. But then there are other -

Geraldine Doogue: .I always remember Mike Carlton's great definition of that 'schadenfreude': the awful joy of watching a human catastrophe unfold. To others.

Julian Burnside: .Yes. Or Terry Lane's, which is my favourite: the sensation of seeing two Mercedes Benz collide. Which I think is as close to a perfect definition of it as I've ever heard.

But it occurred to me that idleness and rubbish were two ideas for which there is a vast variety of words, an astounding richness of words. And so one of them I particularly liked for 'idleness' is 'gongoozler'. And 'gongoozler' was originally a person who would stand at length staring at a canal. One of the quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary in support of it is from that well-known organ, 'Bradshaw's Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales'. Now it's not a word that really would be used terribly often you'd think, and so it broadened its meaning to a person who stares idly at anything for a long time, but even then, with that broader meaning, it seems to have disappeared.

Geraldine Doogue: .Now look, I've just watched the time disappearing away from us, and I really want to give the listeners to hear some of the letters that they've written to us. So can I thank you very much indeed, and urge people to go ahead and look at 'Double Speak' and 'Drinking Words' and 'Fossils' and 'Haitch', and 'Mates' and 'Holy Wars' and 'Laconic'. It's lovely. Thank you very much indeed Julian Burnside. You've done us a service.

Julian Burnside: .Thanks, Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: .Julian Burnside, the paperback of 'Word Watching - Field Note from an Amateur Philologist'. Published by Scribe.

Guests

Julian Burnside
Barrister and QC.

Publications

Title: Wordwatching: Field note from an amateur philologist
Author: Julian Burnside
Publisher: Scribe

Presenter

Geraldine Doogue

Story Researcher and Producer

Scott Wales