By Mursi Saad El-Din I have always loved languages, and after my mother tongue Arabic, English is a favourite. I have tried to perfect the two languages and to try my hand at both. Like the rest of my generation, I learnt English the hard way. The direct method, or learning through patterns, was not for us; grammar was the number-one subject. And we were taught by great teachers. In my primary school my English teachers were graduates of the English department of Fouad I (now Cairo) University. They were also holders of a diploma given by Exeter University after a two year course especially tailored to Egyptian teachers of English. When I passed my primary-school certificate and enrolled in secondary school, my teachers of English were British. I use the word British since some of them were Scottish or Irish. And their accents notwithstanding they all taught us what was known as the King's English. There was always a stress on grammar. When I joined the English department of Fouad I University I was taught by such distinguished writers as the poets Terence Tiller and Bernard Spencer, the linguist David Abercrombie, son of Lascelles, author of P rinciples of Literary Criticism. Mr Taylor was my lecturer on grammar, taught out of Nesfield's textbook. Mr Taylor was a purist and I still remember some of his many donts. "Don't say it's me who did this, but it's I." "Don't say peace between nations, but among nations ." "There's no such adjective as fuller, no glass can be fuller than another." And so he went with his warnings which, I must admit, I still heed. These memories were brought back after reading Melvyn Bragg's book The Adventure of English and a series of articles in the London Times with the title "Word Wise". In this academic, albeit fascinating book, Bragg takes us on a linguistic journey from 500 AD to 2000. The subtitle of his book is "The Biography of a Language". The book has been described as "concise as well as learned". Yet even a bird's eye view of the whole is impossible within the confines of this article; I shall quote Chapter 24 instead: "As with so many of the hundreds of thousands of words which have come into the language since the fifth century, it is all but impossible to discover a single prime creator of these words, words which extend the description and possibilities of our lives. They seem to be conjured out of the air we breathe, just as they are spoken back into that air and carried like pollen on the wind." "Word Wise" discusses new words that have been added to the English language. The writer John Ayto claims that every year about 900 neologisms enter the language. He goes on to explain the process by which a word becomes established: first people in position of influence must use it. The media, claims the writer, "are crucial to spreading new words quickly. Once a word has been in existence for some time, and is used by different sources, it enters the dictionary and the language". Every age claims some new words. As an example the writer cites what happened in the first decade of the 20th century. The new fields of motoring, aviation, film and radio were rich sources. In the 1960s the advent of the computer, the space race and youth culture produced a new vocabulary. In the 1980s, the financial world influenced language. Once words are created, writes Ayto, they never fade. They may fall out of favour for some time, but they always come back. They might be left out in small and concise dictionaries, "but they will always be in the Complete Oxford English Dictionary for posterity". Following this informative introduction, every day the newspaper publishes some kind of glossary of words that might look similar, but have different, often opposite meanings. I have to admit that I have started to collect this daily dose vocabulary, which may appear in my future columns.
