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1、精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上Unit1Pub Talk and the Kings EnglishHenry Fairlie1 Conversation is the most sociable of all human activities. And it is an activity only of humans. However intricate the ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not indulge in anything that deserves the name of conversat
2、ion. 2 The charm of conversation is that it does not really start from anywhere, and no one has any idea where it will go as it meanders or leaps and sparkles or just glows. The enemy of good conversation is the person who has something to say. Conversation is not for making a point. Argument may of
3、ten be a part of it, but the purpose of the argument is not to convince. There is no winning in conversation. In fact, the best conversationalists are those who are prepared to lose. Suddenly they see the moment for one of their best anecdotes, but in a flash the conversation has moved on and the op
4、portunity is lost. They are ready to let it go. 3 Perhaps it is because of my up-bringing in English pubs that I think bar conversation has a charm of its own. Bar friends are not deeply involved in each others lives. They are companions, not intimates. The fact that their marriages may be on the ro
5、oks, or that their love affairs have been broken or even that they got out of bed on the wrong side is simply not a concern. They are like the musketeers of Dumas who, although they lived side by side with each other, did not delve into,each others lives or the recesses of their thoughts and feeling
6、s. 4 It was on such an occasion the other evening, as the conversation moved desultorily here and there, from the most commonplace to thoughts of Jupiter, without any focus and with no need for one, that suddenly the alchemy of conversation took place, and all at once there was a focus. I do not rem
7、ember what made one of our companions say it-she clearly had not come into the bar to say it, it was not something that was pressing on her mind-but her remark fell quite naturally into the talk. 5 Someone told me the Other day that the phrase, the Kings English was a term of criticism, that it mean
8、s language which one should not properly use. 6 The glow of the conversation burst into flames. There were affirmations and protests and denials, and of course the promise, made in all such conversation, that we would look it up on the morning. That would settle it; but conversation does not need to
9、 be settled; it could still go ignorantly on. 7 It was an Australian who had given her such a definition of the Kings English, which produced some rather tart remarks about what one could expect from the descendants of convicts. We had traveled in five minutes to Australia. Of course, there would be
10、 resistance to the Kings English in such a society. There is always resistance in the lower classes to any attempt by an upper class to lay down rules for English as it should be spoken. 8 Look at the language barrier between the Saxon churls and their Norman conquerors. The conversation had swung f
11、rom Australian convicts of the 19th century to the English peasants of the 12th century. Who was right, who was wrong, did not matter. The conversation was on wings. 9 Someone took one of the best-known of examples, which is still always worth the reconsidering. When we talk of meat on our tables we
12、 use French words; when we speak of the animals from which the meat comes we use Anglo-Saxon words. It is a pig in its sty ; it is pork (porc) on the table. They are cattle in the fields, but we sit down to beef (boeuf). Chickens become poultry (poulet), and a calf becomes veal (veau). Even if our m
13、enus were not wirtten in French out of snobbery, the English we used in them would still be Norman English. What all this tells us is of a deep class rift in the culture of England after the Norman conquest. 10 The Saxon peasants who tilled the land and reared the animals could not afford the meat,
14、which went to Norman tables. The peasants were allowed to eat the rabbits that scampered over their fields and, since that meat was cheap, the Norman lords of course turned up their noses at it. So rabbit is still rabbit on our tables, and not changed into some rendering of lapin. 11 As we listen to
15、day to the arguments about bilingual education, we ought to think ourselves back into the shoes of the Saxon peasant. The new ruling class had built a cultural barrier against him by building their French against his own language. There must have been a great deal of cultural humiliation felt by the
16、 English when they revolted under Saxon leaders like Hereward the Wake. The Kings English-if the term had existed then-had become French. And here in America now, 900 years later, we are still the heirs to it. 12 So the next morning, the conversation over, one looked it up. The phrase came into use
17、some time in the 16th century. Queens English is found in Nashs Strange Newes of the Intercepting Certaine Letters in 1593, and in 1602, Dekker wrote of someone, thou clipst the Kinges English. Is the phrase in Shakespeare? That would be the confirmation that it was in general use. He uses it once,
18、when Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor says of her master coming home in a rage, . here will be an old abusing of Gods patience and the Kings English, and it rings true. 13 One could have expected that it would be about then that the phrase would be coined. After five centuries of growt
19、h, o1f tussling with the French of the Normans and the Angevins and the Plantagenets and at last absorbing it, the conquered in the end conquering the conqueror. English had come royally into its own. 14 There was a Kings (or Queen s) English to be proud of. The Elizabethans blew on it as on a dande
20、lion clock, and its seeds multiplied, and floated to the ends of the earth. The Kings English was no longer a form of what would now be regarded as racial discrimination. 15 Yet there had been something in the remark of the Australian. The phrase has always been used a little pejoratively and even f
21、acetiously by the lower classes. One feels that even Mistress Quickly-a servant-is saying that Dr. Caius-her master-will lose his control and speak with the vigor of ordinary folk. If the Kings English is English as it should be spoken, the claim is often mocked by the underlings, when they say with
22、 a jeer English as it should be spoke. The rebellion against a cultural dominance is still there. 16 There is always a great danger, as Carlyle put it, that words will harden into things for us. Words are not themselves a reality, but only representations of it, and the Kings English, like the Anglo
23、-French of the Normans, is a class representation of reality. Perhaps it is worth trying to speak it, but it should not be laid down as an edict , and made immune to change from below. 17 I have an unending love affair with dictionaries-Auden once said that all a writer needs is a pen, plenty of pap
24、er and the best dictionaries he can afford-but I agree with the person who said that dictionaries are instruments of common sense. The Kings English is a modela rich and instructive one-but it ought not to be an ultimatum. 18 So we may return to my beginning. Even with the most educated and the most
25、 literate, the Kings English slips and slides in conversation. There is no worse conversationalist than the one who punctuates his words as he speaks as if he were writing, or even who tries to use words as if he were composing a piece of prose for print. When E. M. Forster writes of the sinister co
26、rridor of our age, we sit up at the vividness of the phrase, the force and even terror in the image. But if E. M. Forster sat in our living room and said, We are all following each other down the sinister corridor of our age, we would be justified in asking him to leave. 19 Great authors are constan
27、tly being asked by foolish people to talk as they write. Other people may celebrate the lofty conversations in which the great minds are supposed to have indulged in the great salons of 18th century Paris, but one suspects that the great minds were gossiping and judging the quality of the food and t
28、he wine. Henault, then the great president of the First Chamber of the Paris Parlement, complained bitterly of the terrible sauces at the salons of Mme. Deffand, and went on to observe that the only difference between her cook and the supreme chef, Brinvilliers , lay in their intentions. 20 The one
29、place not to have dictionaries is in a sit ting room or at a dining table. Look the thing up the next morning, but not in the middle of the conversation. Other wise one will bind the conversation, one will not let it flow freely here and there. There would have been no conversation the other evening
30、 if we had been able to settle at one the meaning of the Kings English. We would never hay gone to Australia, or leaped back in time to the Norman Conquest. 21 And there would have been nothing to think about the next morning. Perhaps above all, one would not have been engaged by interest in the mus
31、keteer who raised the subject, wondering more about her. The bother about teaching chimpanzees how to talk is that they will probably try to talk sense and so ruin all conversation.Unit2 Marrkech1 As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they ca
32、me back a few minutes later.2 The little crowd of mourners - all men and boys, no women-threaded their way across the market place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, walling a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are
33、never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth,
34、which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.3 When you walk through a town like this
35、- two hundred thousand inhabitants of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in- when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you arewalking among human beings. All colonial empires are in real
36、ity founded upon this fact. The people have brown faces-besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as your self? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth，they s
37、weat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rathe
38、r bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.4 I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.5 Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquar
39、ters without thinking of a mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took anoth
40、er nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.6 An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled slowly towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gaz
41、elle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in French: 1 could eat some of that bread.7 I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man is an employee of themunicipality.8 When y
42、ou go through the Jewish Quarters you gather some idea of what the medi ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish Moorishrulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many
43、 of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.9 In the bazaar huge families of Je
44、ws, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits crosslegged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chairlegs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his l
45、eft foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.10 I was just passing the coppersmiths booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly,
46、from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand.
47、In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.11 As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for
48、 agriculture. Fruitsellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters - whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitlet w
49、asnt here. Perhaps he was on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.12 Yes vieux mon vieux, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They re the real rulers of this country, you know. Theyve got all the money. They control the banks, finance - everything.13