Say what? Let’s try to understand

THE PAST few days have witnessed some extraordinary displays of racism, ranging from serious advocacy of genocide (“cleansing of white people from South Africa”) to a modest proposal to correct the education minister’s mispronunciation of a single term. Obviously, this is a vast topic and the punishment should fit the crime. But without avoiding the issues of “deep deliberate racism”, let us focus on the linguistic issue.

One must start with some basic understandings. First, black people who can speak English should be congratulated on a considerable achievement. For them English is usually their second or third language.

Furthermore, English is totally different in sounds, vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure from their mother tongues.

As a pompous character in Dickens says arrogantly to a Frenchman: “Our language is difficult. Ours is a copious language and trying to strangers.”

It is also trying to the native speakers, for whom “correct” pronunciation has assumed an undue importance, and corresponding mockery for any error. George W Bush’s repeated use of “nucular” and other “Bushisms” earned him much scorn.

All the major authors of English literature from Chaucer onwards have satirised both errors and the pedantic insistence on correctness.