An Irishman's Diary: Alphabet soup

An Australian voice coach called Dean Frenkel caused some consternation in his country last month when, in an opinion piece for the (Melbourne) Age, he complained of the "national speech impediment".

He didn’t mean the accent, “a complex soup of . . . English, Irish, German, Aboriginal” and many other influences. No, that was “great”, he thought. What bothered him was the lazy articulation of certain words that made many Australians sound like “drunks”.

Politicians were among his worst offenders, including prime minister Tony Abbot, indicted for always saying “probly” instead of “probably” and “gumment” for “government”. In fact, the elimination of middle syllables was a recurring theme of the critique. Thus, the Victorian state premier was accused of shrinking the commonwealth (to “commwealth”) at every opportunity.

Frenkel suggested that these and others manglings of English might be political in a deeper sense. Back in the 19th century, he wrote, the “rebellious speech manner” was a form of protest, asserting Aussie identity against “British imperial clarity”.

Anyway, I’ll leave it to Australians to decide whether their verbal habits are a problem. All I can say is that, as we know in this country, they don’t have a monopoly on English-mangling politicians.

Our own former leader Bertie Ahern, to give just one example, produced some world-class malapropisms (“smokes and daggers”, “upsetting the apple-tart”, etc) in his time, although most of his crimes against language were far less quotable. That, indeed, was his true genius.

He usually appeared to make sense while speaking, but when you tried to penetrate the rain-forest of amiable circumlocutions and non-sequiturs afterwards, it was often impossible to guess what, if anything, it meant. Yet Bertie’s strained relationship with English never diminished his popularity. On the contrary, in the process of political evolution, it gave him a Darwinian edge over other politicians, like John Bruton, who had (and retains) the misfortune of making himself understood.

But getting back to Australia, and the linguistic "soup" from which its speech habits emerged, I'm reminded of one of the many unforgettable stories in that great book, Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, a story that, inter alia, illustrates how some languages die out and others thrive.

It involved a trio of bush-rangers who operated in Van Diemen’s Land during the early 1800s. The gang comprised two Irishmen, Scanlan and Brown, and an Englishman, Lemon.

And for a time they roamed the Tasmanian interior as a trio, surviving in the traditional manner which, as Hughes wrote of such gangs in general, involved a willingness to “kill a man as soon as a kangaroo”.

An issue soon arose among them, however, at least for Lemon, namely that the other two had a habit of speaking “Gaelic” together, a language from which he was excluded.

The modern reader will assume that he responded to this challenge by seeking Irish lessons from Scanlan and Brown, who were only too happy to share their ancient culture with him. But, er, no.

Lemon instead decided to apply Occam’s Razor to the problem, or in this case Occam’s handgun. One day when Scanlan was out hunting kangaroos, he crept up behind Brown at the campfire and blew his brains out.

Hughes records that the martyr to Irish was then strung up by the heels from a gum tree, “as if he were [...] a ‘boomer’ (big kangaroo) for skinning”.

With such grim humour did Lemon announce Scanlan’s demise to the other Irishman. “Now Brown,” he added, “as there are only two of us, we shall understand one another better for the future”.

Indeed they did. Reduced to two syllables, as it were, the gang survived for a couple of years afterwards, killing widely, before bounty-hunters in turn killed Lemon and then forced Scanlan to remove Lemon’s head and carry it in a bag to Hobart, so they could claim the reward for both.

That’s a bleak note to end a column on, I know. But in a lighter vein, luckily, the Australian slang for an outsized kangaroo reminds me of Bertie Ahern’s crowning blooper when, replying to critics of his economic management in 2006, he predicted that the boom was getting “even more boomer”.

He was right, short term. The boom did get boomer, for a while. Then it got a bit less boomy. And then, to borrow another Australian term, it went boomerang.

@FrankmcnallyIT