LEND ME YOUR EAR: MULTILANGUAGE ENGLISH LEAVES US IN A PICKLE!

On an unidentified campus, multicultural extremists are said to have perpetrated a reign of terror against those who refuse to call freshmen "freshpersons." This astonishing nugget of information appeared in the April 8 issue of Time, in an essay titled "Teach Diversity with a Smile." The author, the well-known Barbara Ehrenreich, recognizes the need for diversity (another word for multiculturism), and no one can dispute it. At the same time, she finds adjustment difficult because she was brought up on monoculturism.

In my unsolicited view, to make such a fuss over a single word has little to do with multiculturism. To me, a "freshperson" is a fresh person one who is bold, saucy, impudent and the term seems more descriptive of the warmongers than of the freshmen themselves. Furthermore, I see no connection between multiculturism and the need to substitute "person" in every word ending in man. That's female extremism. A short while back, a "songsperson" chose "Be Your Own Man" as her favorite song. Sounds more like monoculturism, doesn't it? Why haven't the dictators demanded a change to "Be Your Own Person"?

But then, who expects consistency from a gaggle of protesters? In a cartoon in a recent New Yorker, I came across the term "shareperson." The cartoonist was only satirizing the trend, but we grant "shareperson" comes closer to the cause of diversity than does "freshperson." Sharing is what diversity is all about.

As we tried to make clear in last week's column ("American English takes many forms"), the English language is nothing if not multicultural. It was polyglot from the beginning. But the many forms it takes today make it extremely difficult for members of other cultures to learn. How many British-English dialects are there in England alone, to say nothing of the Isles and the world over? (For that matter, how many Arabic, Indian, African, Germanic, Oriental, and others would pose the same problem for us?) As we all know, American English varies from region to region, and sometimes baffles us. By American we mean United States English. Canadians may speak American or British English. (Mexico, Central and South America are also American, but English is not their prevailing language.)

Still, in a column purporting to serve the cause of correct English in the United States of America, we have to settle for something less than diverse. Our purpose is to preserve what is best as we know it while recognizing the inevitability of change. Basics are still basic, however, and I know of no experts in the field who go along with trends that ignore or defy proper usage.

Few of our readers claim to be experts, yet I receive numerous complaints regularly about the offenses against grammar and usage made by prominent speakers, celebrities, and others of alleged class. Let me add that teachers and other professionals are equally shall we say careless? Thus our young people, foreign exchange students, university populations representing countries all over the world, and newcomers from other nations are placed at a further disadvantage, trying to grasp meanings expressed in the simplest of terms.

As for word meanings, the trouble is further compounded for our multinational population because people keep making up words, and we have so many that are similar, or have too many meanings, sound the same but are spelled differently, or can be taken seriously or tongue-in-cheek. Although space limits examples, two have conveniently appeared on our horizon in the nick of time; one in speech, the other in print:

On a TV special, an educator introduced a lady who was being honored for years of service to the cause, and announced that she had found a school for ladies. Unless the honoree was searching for the school, she founded it. Found is the past tense of find; founded is the past tense of the verb found, meaning to establish.

Everyone is familiar with garnish, if not the word. It's the stuff we put on hot dogs and hamburgers. Some time ago, a friend asked me to set readers straight on the difference between garnish and garnishee. I covered this earlier, I told her, with a story about a creditor who had asked my father to garnish an employee's wages. But a headline sent to The Washington Post has arrived just in time to provide a fitting end to this column:

"Gorbachev May Garnish Dividends From Proposal."

The word wanted was garner, meaning to gather or acquire. The provider of the headline, whose name I missed, wondered what sort of garnish Gorbachev would prefer. My suggestion is the pickle Gorbachev and the headline writer are currently in. But try to explain this pickle to our international guests and populations.