Äñțǐ-Ċørřęčť Êņğłîşh
I’m sure you’d have no problem recalling what the last thing you said was (unless you’ve taken a long vow of silence and the memories of your former talking days are fading piece by piece). What was the last thing you spoke, and did it come out right? Did it sound acceptable? If you were to be scored from 1-10 (1 being total gibberish and 10 being perfect eloquence) what would you rate the thing you last said?
Now repeat the last thing that came out of your mouth enough times that it completely loses its semantic structure and sounds like blablabla.
You may not have noticed, with everything that’s going on around you, but the English language is held in the intensive care unit, hooked up to a jungle of intravenous drips flooding its system with a desperate cocktail of life-sustaining drugs. How did it get there?
Collapsed lung due to old age.
And the trouble is, the vast English-speaking world isn’t ready for their language to pass on from its metaphysical mortality just yet or else they’d be forced to walk around all mute until they develop new means of communication. People versed in the various forms of sign language will be fine.
It's unclear whether the case is similar with other languages, but English most certainly has been in violent death throes for the last two decades and it must be kept sedated before it does any more damage to itself and others.
Just what the hell are you talking about, I hear you thinking, English looks, sounds and feels perfectly fine to me. You wouldn’t be blamed for missing the signs because they were buried under a soil of synthetic normalcy, but those who caught on did so when they noticed that English had become as boring as erectile dysfunction.
Words started to exhaust their meaning through overuse, taken out of their native contexts and forced to live a life of continual prostitution in sentences that can’t accommodate them. Refer to words like “interesting”, “aesthetic”, “curate”, “literally”.
Also like consider the major like linguistic seizures when the word “like” is like used like every few words because like no other words are like coming to mind, it like looks like the sentence is like stabbed multiple times by the word “like”.
Once English-proper was stuck in the back of an ambulance bound for a hospital in an undisclosed location, it invariably left a vacuum in language, one which had to be filled immediately. The replacement was obvious, a sub-strain of the language which goes by “Correct English”. Or “Institutional English”. Whichever one you prefer. As the name suggests, this is the type of English used in official settings, the tongue of bureaucracy which exudes a toneless mechanical perfection. Who could be a better candidate?
Correct English isn’t a new thing which only got drawn up with the atrophy of its predecessor however, it’s been around as long as business and bureaucracy. Unless one was surrounded by it day and night by which an immunity to its boredom-toxins would be built, just reading through one page of Correct English turns the eyeballs into stone. You basically wouldn’t use it unless you were made to. It’s a truly dispassionate and heartless language which befits the torturous nature of its intended use. Which is why when its presence starts to spill outside of the pit where it belongs, into the everyday and other departments of life where it shouldn’t be welcome, there is cause for deep concern. Correct English has no claim to altruism, it doesn’t have the right to state that it’s taking over the operation of English out of the kindness of its cinder-block heart. The effect is the cause. English is being replaced by Correct English because it is dying. English is dying because Correct English is taking over.
If one wanted more proof of English’s moribund state, look no further than the coma that Text is vegetating in. The written word had been the godfather of circulating all information, entertainment, trash, enlightenment, love, hatred, and just about any aspect of life put down on paper since the explosion of the printing press. It was a long and eventful few centuries.
However, all of that began losing momentum with the invention of the camera. The Image was born. Then it began moving 24 times per second. Then it began sparring with “reality” itself as the lines between them went fuzzy once the Image was taken up as a political tool. Then the internet supercharged it, splattering it on every conceivable surface like a star going supernova and violently ejecting all of its arcipluvian matter into the dark canvas of space. Now we perceive the rest of the universe through the lens of the Image, and each infinitely reproducible and copiable version of the Image constitutes a whole reality in itself.
All of this was too much for Text to bear as it suffered one stress-induced heart attack after another, until it keeled over and measured its length on the floor in a state of sickening paralysis. This town ain’t big enough for the two of them. While Text remains in an unfathomable coma, hooked up to a life support machine registering very little brain activity which can be accounted to those few and diminishing instances where the written word is still used and consumed, the only question that remains about Text’s inexorable fate is, when?
Since Text’s doom is pretty much sealed, a short eulogy would help clear the hoarder’s nest that is my conscience a bit.
We’ve all gathered here in our absence to see off Text as it departs this world and into whatever existence lay in wait for it next. Let us join together and remember all the good the word dedicated to page has done us. It has been the waterfall from which the innermost lives of many have come flowing out into the world. It has been the quasar at the heart of a dead galaxy which lights up in fervent joy when the sublime becomes intertwined with words printed on a page. It has allowed idiots to perpetuate their imbecility to be taken up by many, and seers to share their knowledge and understanding towards a better life to be picked up by none. It was the articulate expression of life unmastered, just the way it’s supposed to be. There can be no altern… who am I kidding? No one is reading this. You’re not reading this. Because there’s no pictorial accompaniment.
If Correct English had its way, it’d be standing with a pillow in its hands over the stiff and prostrate body of English-proper laying in its hospital bed tangled up in a web of IV drips. Just smother the bastard and put it out of its misery so you can serendipitously replace it.
For all of its services to humankind, why should we let English die the quiet and uneventful death that Correct English would prefer it? Its demise should be colourful, messy, chaotic, completely bewildering upon the senses, and as loud as the combined voice of every word written, spoken, and thought since the dawn of time.
What little is left of English must be used with blissful freedom and completely inversely to how Correct English would exhort us to use it. Forget Correct English, how about Anti-Correct English? Pluck words out of thin air, write like the pen is a rocket ripping through the atmosphere of the page to reach the infinities of beauty, speak with the passion of a natural disaster.
Those wild and untameable tongues of Äńtį-Čørrêçt Ēñgłîśh speak the process that is the emancipation of the natural absurdity of the universe. Buried deep underneath sedimented layers of frivolous utilitarian bullshit which humanity accumulates with double-quick pace like dandruff on unwashed hair is the sublime weirdness of existence.
That oscillating wildfire of being which leaps from one atom to the next until the whole cosmos is alive with strange magic and phantasmagoria is on the surface of the Earth reduced to a pathetic lambent flicker of a candle fearfully burning away the last of its wax. So trapped are we within the embedded patterns of our rattling tailspin into endless degradation as a lifeform that we’ve become completely blind to the dazzling abnormality of existence.
All particles that make up the matter in this universe, from the flesh on your bones, the chair you’re currently sitting on, the walls which are housing you right now, the food you eat earlier or will later eat, to the sun that is lighting up the daytime, the planet upon which we’re cluelessly floating through the void, the kaleidoscopic nebulae and galaxies which populate this boundless ocean like islands, they’re all connected. That infinitesimal singularity where everything was one, out of which the entirety of the cosmos BANGED impatiently forth in all points of space simultaneously is where the unbreakable bonds between all particles were formed and that’s where they will eventually converge again when everything mournfully implodes, reuniting us all like old friends after a lengthy separation.
While otherworldly craziness begins to unfold a mere 100km above the Earth’s surface like the bands of a double rainbow unweaving themselves and getting tangled up among one another, down here the only craziness that’s happening is clinical. A huge portion of humanity lead their lives miserably in the service of others, stuck inside the invisible machinery of society which seeks to break them down to their constituent elements. Not atoms and particles but the fundamentals which keep those at the controls of this mechanic beast in power: money and labour. Satisfaction is in dwindling supply and the demand is ever growing. True happiness is elusive and ephemeral. The human species have become a cancer that has turned to attacking itself.
The average human life is stifled with a long list of routines, obligations, rules, responsibilities, preoccupations, appointments, and monotonies that any reality that exists outside the same route taken to work and back is simply irrelevant. That curious absurdity which elevates the act of existing into the act of living has been snatched away from many.
The basic actuality of everything is an exercise in surrealism. So why should we communicate with one another like flatlines on a heartbeat monitor when we should be exchanging the essences of life like lines on a seismograph during a magnitude 9 earthquake.
In a society that has gone collectively insane, the only way to communicate is through lunacy. ANTI-CORRECT ENGLISH dexterously straddles the line which demarcates nonsense from intelligence. To speak in its liberating tongue is a conscious effort of turning gibberish into expression, following ardently in the footsteps of Dada poetry and surrealist writing where deep within fusillades of senselessness and random chaos are powerful blasts of brilliance so unique and mystifying that chaos is convinced to briefly rearrange itself and reveal the enigmatic methods which remain hidden behind an impenetrable fortress of madness.
If you’ve ever had to read a contract, your bills, a council/government letter, or just about any form of unwanted junk correspondence which slips through your letter box or clutters up your email you may have noticed that all of them read like they’ve been written by the same person. Regardless of what company you work for, who supplies your energy and other services, or which council in which part of the country you live, all these letters have their monotone, robotic, and uninviting perfection in common. The language at work here has all the character and personality of a mass grave, and its reading flow is akin to that of a corpse weighed down with concrete blocks as it sinks to the bottom of a river. And the reason behind Correct English’s faceless automation is because it is a machine language. I don’t just mean that it’s a language fit for machines and any mechanised contraption lacking a soul.
To write Correct English is to relinquish all things natural, to choose order over disorder. This language is a direct product of the robotic regimentation of society. Each word exudes the power structures which indentured the person to write them and the expectations it holds over the person reading it. These are words written by the modern-day slave; interns, clerks, assistants, press staff, many of whom don’t get paid nearly enough for the torturous ordeal of snuffing their humanity every Monday to Friday. The paper-pushers write this drivel in the service of organisations and corporations who are privy to their existence and see them as expendable and easily replaceable. But you’ve got to make a living somehow or you just fall through the wide fractures in society into perpetual invalidity.
The written words of Correct English are typed up, with an empty mind and a distant expression of existential disdain, on the writer’s personal computers which act as but one point in a vast planetary network of machines. Pushed through the computer when the SEND button is clicked, the text gets dumped into vicious circulation within the perambulating vortex of data and information, the blood which flows through this planet-wide automaton. Chewed up by one computer then regurgitated and spat out only to be eaten and heaved up again by another, any microscopic traces of inflection, tone, and timbre are washed away like drug money being laundered, until it arrives before the recipient’s eyes as just a collection of dislocated and empty words. Alienated and discombobulated the reader walks away with words in their brain which are being rejected by the consciousness.
People can be found in a similar state when standing face to face with contextual statements in an art gallery. What?! The art gallery! How?
Correct English has gone unnoticed in art establishments by audiences because of the prevailing view that art galleries and museums are these neutral sites of cultural learning which exist solely for the edification of humankind. Sounds like bullshit to me. Art galleries are at their very core institutions, and very powerful ones at that, who shake hands with some of the richest and dirtiest of them all to keep themselves funded. Every piece of art shown in an art gallery gets immediately subsumed into the narrative the institution is trying to create, a narrative usually gendered and racialised that tends to have a taste for the male and white. But that’s a can of worms which will be opened another time.
The agents responsible for orchestrating this narrative through the collection of artworks exhibited can be anything from the curation, contextual statements, artwork descriptions, to the press releases, exhibition catalogues, and subsequently the word of mouth among visitors which perpetuates the gallery’s agenda.
Recall your last visit to a museum or art gallery, what did every piece of text, which accompanied the artworks like malaria accompanies a mosquito bite, have in common? They have all the pomp and twisted recognisability as the wreckage of an airplane. One has no trouble instantly spotting it. How it ended up like it did is totally irrelevant when all that remains is a flaming, mangled skeleton of what it originally was. And in the end no trace of humanity survives.
These pieces of text have the fingerprints of Correct English all over them, yet this incestuous permutation of the language is specific to the art world. There’s a certain vernacular which makes the Correct English used in art galleries and painfully written up by interns so recognisable. The representative methodologies of this language is a stark departure from the reality of ways of speaking, prefiguring a space where the tension between the contemplation of dialogue and production of various forms of dialectics is negated by the totality of lingual objectification. In normal speak, the Correct English in the art world is a purely material and depthless language. But art institutions just cannot resist the urge to write in this discount eloquence, using a weird form of vocabulary which sounds like various words from a philosophy handbook wrenched out of their original contexts and locked together in a chain gang to be paraded on the gallery walls next to the artwork or in the press release/catalogue. This is also the tool used to dress up fundamentally rubbish art with something that only faintly resembles a deeper meaning. The bullshitting capabilities of this language are so vast that a puddle of piss in the gallery hallway suddenly turns into a meditation on the transformation of purityinto waste through the natural processes of corporeal biology.
Apart from killing all forms of arousal, this Correct art speak reeks of elitism where a thick linguistic wall made from the bricks of superfluous verbosity is constructed around the art pieces to only allow in those who can work out the puzzling and often paradoxical meaning of the texts. The rest stay the hell out.
What the fuck does Correct mean anyway? Whose corrections are these which we must docilely follow? It isn’t one select person or a particular group of people. It is neither from a certain period of time. Those rules which the many are expected to follow are pieced together by the few who inhabit the upper echelons of society in every country of the planet. This faceless group of immense cultural, political, and social power is always in flux, one dies to be replaced by another, and its unattainable exclusivity ensures that its influences stay within its ranks. By keeping the stock among themselves are they able to perpetuate whatever ideology they want the masses to follow with the fanaticism of a cockroach.
If you’ve been carrying the belief around with you that language is a neutral thing that simply exists to be used by us, then it’s about time you dropped it. Contrary to its illusions of democracy and productivity, language is something which is fashioned over long centuries by the societal elite; scholars, connoisseurs, policymakers, corporate leadership, and historians in dedicated service to the regimes of power who will ensure these personnel maintain their social elevation above the plebian masses. Language is one of the deadliest weapons in the arsenal of authority because those in control of it also govern the expression of thought. Change the language and you dramatically alter the conveyance of one’s thinking.
When the bastard form of Correct English is inserted within these circumstances, some pretty unmistakable patterns begin to emerge.
With all its devotion to the rules and overzealous perfection to articulation and delivery, Correct English is a marker of status. This superficial boy-scout’s patch of status can either be an intellectual or national one or both.
Dissecting its aspirations for intellectual status is as easy as cutting open a frog. Those who speak English in the Correct manner and can understand what is being said to them, despite what their actual intelligence might be, are accorded the marker of intellect at a first impression. And for those who don’t are branded as simpletons. You won’t find it difficult to spot those who have adopted Correct English in an attempt to separate themselves intellectually from the rest through their behaviour of inanely correcting the language of others. English teachers get a pass here, but that’s not to deny the vertical power structure that exists between the student and teacher which is a completely different kettle of fish that I’m not going to bother opening right now.
The national status of Correct English on the other hand is like dissecting a cat. It’s fair to assume that natives of an English-speaking country have a confident grasp over their language. They can read, write, and speak with relative acuity. To the natives, language isn’t merely a means of communicating, it’s their honourable right to belong. English to the English-speaker is an automatic means of survival because they depend on it to get their message across not just in their country but internationally too where a growing number of industry settings like air-traffic communication have adopted English as their universal language. Although this Western privilege hasn’t only left its population linguistically lazy but also backwards in their thinking.
When foreigners arrive in their country who have to take up and learn English as a second language to survive, this really grinds the gears of some natives. Upon noticing that these people aren’t speaking English how it’s supposed to be spoken, the natives waste no time in pointing out their slights. These reactions can vary from correcting remarks to outright xenophobia or racism where the blockheaded native berates the foreigner over their “broken English”. It appears to be obvious then that to these people the only criterion worth judging the migrants by is their capacity in English. The rest – their philosophies, personalities, opinions – become unnecessary in their eyes because if they can’t speak English then what are they doing here? Much like its counterpart of intellectual status, Correct English used as a highlighter of status has this effect of Othering, creating a divide between those who are using English Correctly and those heathens who don’t.
So sweet is the irony that wine could be made out of it when you consider that most of these atavistic natives who desperately cling onto Correct English as symbolic of their status can barely speak the language themselves, just about surpassing plain communication, and unlike the foreigners who are versed in more than just their mother tongue these abusive natives are wallowing in monolingualism.
Ask yourself what is this feverish status proving all for? It surely can’t just be a personal thing if this many people are rushing to snatch their little fragments of privilege over English.
Such a regimental adoption of Correct English hence becomes a desperate need for proof and validation that the society we live in is indeed civilised. The West have spent such a long time forcing their so-called civilised ways on others that they’ve gotten mixed up over their own civility. All of Western society’s insecurities; their phobia of intellectual and spiritual degradation, the twisted desire of homogenisation where the blood of the nation remains pure and strong, and their consternation over a bunch of working-class ruffians besmirching the dialogue of society, to name but a few, are reflected in all their ugly irrationality in the countenance of Correct English. On a very rudimentary level what the widespread usage of Correct English turns out to be is an exercise in “fake it till you make it" because whatever was left of our spirits disintegrated long ago, purity in a nation is as elusive as drug purity in London, and all those dignified and staid masks of society deserve to be spat on by those who have been exploited the most, so I guess we might as well just pretend that we have a scintilla of decorum left.
No thank you.
In the final days of the English language, before it is usurped by its Correct counterpart, that is when we need AnTi-CoRrEcT eNgLiSh the most.
The English language began its collapse from the moment its first word was uttered and throughout its lifespan it has gone through epochs of beautiful disarray, but now the particles are slowing down, their energy spent, as the hand of entropy stills their restlessness.
Abandon all rules, defenestrate logic, let chaos and anarchy become the defining character in the winter of a language that has done us the brilliant and terrible service. Speak without the fear of sense because each gibberish utterance and written sentence that transcends those exclusionist rules of Correct English will appeal to all 7.9 billion people on the planet differently. Their dispositions and personalities will sharpen the blurred lines of your jabbering. Some will be confused, they’ll get angry, react unexpectedly and might resort to abuse, but let them, because others might understand, they’ll laugh and respond with their own musical nonsense.
Because after all, the way we all speak should have the same chaos, the same infinite brilliance as nature itself.
