LEND ME YOUR EAR: ON FLOGGING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Readers of these columns became familiar with Richard Lederer's book CRAZY ENGLISH when it was published, and the whole country was delighted with the widely-known author's observations. Even when small children are forever questioning the logic of our usage. Bil Keane bears this out in the examples he drives into the heads of his small fry in Family Circus.

Some time ago, a lady whose name I knew wrote me that when her granddaughter Abigail was four years old, she proudly held up a drawing for her and said, "Look, Grandma, I drawed a little girl in a swing."

Grandmother Helen Ueleke, following the tactics her mother had used to teach her how to use words, replied, "No, dear, you drew a little girl in a swing."

"But Grandma," corrected the little angel, "this isn't a drewing, it's a drawing." So much for a first lesson in how to teach English to pre-schoolers. Or college graduates, for that matter.

Shortly before Christmas, I conceded that I could give no hard-and-fast rules governing spelling. To illustrate, I pointed out the trouble we have with homonyms and homophones -- words pronounced the same but different in meaning, words spelled differently but pronounced the same and still far apart in meaning. As I often do, I also touched upon contranyms -- words spelled the same and pronounced the same but having opposite meanings.

Until last October, none of our readers had questioned the use of "flog." Most people think of flog as meaning to spank, smack, whip, beat, or any other synonym boding ill. Not so in the publishing world. When James Kilpatrick's new book FINE PRINT appeared, he wrote that he would be traveling around the country flogging his new brainchild the rest of the year, as he had in 1984 when THE WRITER'S ART was making it big. He explained to me that writers no longer promoted their books, they flogged them. This time around, his secretary used the word in an order form sent out, and friends who wanted a copy were baffled by "flog."

Recently, my friend Esther Hartmann, teacher of pre-schoolers at Trinity Lutheran in Cape Girardeau, overheard a conversation between two of her charges. They were talking about their lessons, and one mentioned English. "What's English?" asked the other.

"English is what we speak." said her precocious informant. "Don't you speak English?" "No, I speak regular," was the little one's sage reply.

Think how simple English would be if all of us were to speak "regular." On the other hand, how dull! No controversies or doubts about usage, no books on how to write and where English is headed. Worse still, no need for columns flogging good grammar and how to write legibly and better!

Some weeks ago, a versified capsule on the state of the language titled "When English was a language" arrived in the mail. Excerpts may be in order though some have been with us since before the '60s:

Remember when hippie

meant big in the hips,

And a trip involved travel

in cars, planes or ships?

When pot was a vessel

for cooking things in,

And hooked was what your

grandmother's rug may have

been?

When roll meant a bun,

and rock was a stone,

And hung-up was something

you did with a phone?

Words, once so sensible,

sober and serious,

Are making the freak-scene

like psychodelirious.

It's groovy, man, groovy,

but English it's not:

Methinks the language

has gone straight to pot.

Whoever wrote this anonymous charge was flogging in both directions. Just having fun, like the rest of us language lovers.

I once wrote a parody on a few well-known lines from Robert Browning's "Pippa Passes." It was no masterpiece either, though it placed in a contest for women in the arts. No one takes us seriously when we flog the English language, whether we mean to whip or promote the cause.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!