I started this blog off a number of years ago with a series of curmudgeon-isms, and embarrassed though I am to return to that theme, last week leaves me no choice. My first complaint is the indecipherability of public address systems in airports. It seems that it’s never occurred to airport administrators that it might be helpful to assign someone the task of checking to see if these wah-wah-wah-wah-wahs serve any purpose whatsoever other than to irritate the fuck out of passengers who can only worry in vain they might be missing important information about their flight.
My second complaint falls into the intersections of curmudgeon-ism and just straightforward bigotry. A sentence in a natural language – in our case English – is not just a series of phoneme-approximations. One needs to take the trouble to articulate the individual words constitutive of the sentence, and she needs to learn to put the emphasis on the right syllable. Few recent immigrants, especially from the sub-continent, have learned to master these skills, at least sufficiently to serve the native English-speaking peoples of North America, England, and the Antipodes. This is especially problematic when the service the customer is on the line for is his banking information.
I fully understand that customer service is often the only entry-level jobs these people can get, and that they’re often the only people willing to do these jobs. The problem is they’re not doing the job. And I understand that it would cost the banks – and hence the consumer – too much to train these people so they can do the job. I’d be willing to pay the extra, but I realise many, perhaps most, people wouldn’t.
I realise that both of these complaints make me a settler colonialist racist. And after all, more people speak sub-continental English than the rest of the English-speaking world combined. So if a language just is the way most of its speakers speak it, then we should be imitating them rather than demanding they imitate us. But when we try to speak the way they do we’re accused – well yes, rightly so – of mocking them.
So what’s the solution? Simple. Install on our smart phones a program that automatically translates from subcontinental to – oh what the hell, let’s call it – White English. Would that be so hard? And while we’re at it …

Categories: Editorials, Humour