LA en vie

Apostrophe's

Few things embarrass me more than making a mistake in my writing, even though in English, at least, everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Intellectually, I know perfectly well that that a living language is constantly changing and that yesterday's grammatical mistake is today's normal usage. But I am still at heart a language snob and a conservative. If I were French, I would probably want to write estoit instead of était and find it normal that scholars are trying to fossilize the language in a huge prescriptive dictionary. If I were British, I'm sure I would look down my nose at Americans and spell "jail" with a g (so sensible!) and say "the government are."

Back in my own country, I am having a hard time with the assault of badly spelled English on all sides. One of the biggest differences between the English in England and the English here, besides the fact that most Americans are descended from non-English-speakers, is that in England, everyone who writes for the public eye has probably achieved at least an A-level standard in English. Here, even teachers and journalists for major newspapers make egregious mistakes. The mistakes are so common that I feel sure they will become the new standard usage.

A's school here, known as a very good one, sent home a reading list for the summer in which a history teacher recommends The Perfect Mile with "The rivalry that developed between he and Santee is riveting" (and an academic administrator writes of a famous book, "After reading this book I could not believe that I had never heard of it"). In general, everyone says "from he and I" and "with she and I."

No one in the entire United States under the age of fifty seems to know how to use apostrophes or the abbreviations "they're" and "you're." Let's not even get into "its" and "it's"! English is unusually hard to spell; French is even worse. Maybe we should just adopt the German method and do without apostrophes completely. Who need's them?

Whenever I get upset about these things, I remember that the word "grammar" is related to "grimoire" (book of magic, in French) and to "glamour" and that they all come from the idea that a Latin grammar book had something glamorous, magical, and unknown about it. The whole idea that there is a correct way to write and spell is a little kooky from a linguistic point of view anyway.

The famous passenger

We have a young British visitor at the moment. She got off the plane Friday with big eyes. "J.K. Rowling was on my flight!"

The last bastion of English America

I am still in West Virginia, the alternate America. Almost everyone over 21 is obese, except the cigarette smokers and a few wiry workmen in blue jeans.

The other day I went to the county courthouse with my mother, and  while I was waiting for her, nosed around the building. There was a distinct air of the South in that courthouse, with its turning fans, opaque-glass-fronted office doors, and dark wood staircases-- it reminded me of my childhood in Jim Crow Louisiana, when the water fountains were still marked "White" and "Colored"; but although it is Southern, West Virginia has very few African-Americans (or any other minorities): 3.2 %, almost all in the few large towns. Few recent immigrants have made it over the mountains to West Virginia, either. Most of the natives are descended from Scotch-Irish settlers of the late 18th century. They still use quaint expressions that died out in British English hundreds of years ago and are marked "obsolete" in the dictionary. They tend to be truculent, blond and loyal.

On the wall above my bench was a large framed poster with photos of the two dozen or so sheriff's deputies. Every single one was a white man with an English or Scottish name.

The young Afrikaner

When it comes to countries, for me it's "love the one you're with." I've been traveling through England the past few days, in unexpected snowstorms, and it's so beautiful. I visited Wordsworth's Dove Cottage in the Lake District, where to my surprise we were showed around by a young black American girl with the beginnings of a transatlantic accent; and Hadrian's Wall in the company of a Bolshy member of my family, who compares the mountains of Britain unfavorably to Ohio with more rain. I guess the reluctance was understandable as we marched up barren stony hills and cobblestoned streets in the face of driving corn snow. But the British also invented the word "cosy" (we spell it "cozy"). After a long day out walking, you sink into a wing chair in a warm dark-paneled pub, or a slightly shabby wall-papered drawing room with a fire, and feel that your drink is well deserved.

A couple of nights ago I came downstairs to have a whiskey at the bar in my country house hotel and found that the barkeep was the same fresh-faced, slim young Afrikaner who had earlier brought up a supper tray. We got into a conversation about crime in his country.

"In S'th Efrica," he said, "it's getting worse. My parents live in a guarded, gated community outside Johannesburg now, but when I was growing up we didn't." He held up his hand and pointed at a recent scar. "Knife," he said, and told me how he had been robbed of his cell phone while waiting at his school for a ride, just a few months ago. "I looked at my hand and saw the knife sticking right up through it. I couldn't believe it." Unluckily for the robbers, plainclothes police were right around the corner. They stopped and separated the robbers, whose stories of how they came by the phone did not coincide.

"That wasn't the first time I was stabbed," he said. "I almost died the other time. It was a few months earlier. I was taking a short-cut home from school across a veldt near my house, and these two guys came up to me and asked for my phone. I said I didn't have one. So they asked for my backpack. It was a Billabong. I said no, and they stabbed me three times, right here in the side." He pointed at his side, a few inches up from his waist. "I fell down, and they started kicking me in the head. Then they left."

"But that could have killed you!" I said.

"Oh yeah, I thought I was going to die," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "They tried to kill me. But my stepbrother came by a while later and got me. He saw I was late coming home and was worried about me, so he went out looking for me. He's a big guy, works out, you know. He saw these two guys with my Billabong backpack and recognized it. They didn't see him, so he came up behind them when they weren't expecting it and just beat them up. Then he came and got me."

"Why didn't he call the police?" I said.

"He thought they'd just stolen the backpack. He didn't know they'd stabbed me. He took me to the hospital and I had twenty-five stitches. Right here," he said, pointing. "The thing is, the guys who do this, they were all black guys ('bleck ice'). I have nothing against bleck ice, but after that I got mad. Me and my stepbrother and some friends, about eight of us, we would go out and if we saw a bleck guy alone, we would just beat him up."

"But he was just as innocent as you were!" I said, appalled.

"Yeah, I know," he said, thoughtfully. "That's when I said to myself, 'I've got to get at of this country.'"

Scots and rules in Paris

On Friday I came through the airport at Paris/CDG along with a large number of burly men dressed in bright blue t-shirts, kilts and what my old friend Adrian used to refer to as "shit-kicking boots." This is the uniform of the Scotland supporter. They were arriving for the Scotland vs France rugby tournament.

How good it felt to hear French again! I had told my family that moving to California, after living overseas for so long, was like falling into a warm bath, easy and familiar. But actually, coming back to CDG was familiar too. I helped a Moroccan woman with two small children to another terminal in time to make her connection, was greeted in French by the flight attendants, and sneaked around to the "secret" security gate that only the habitués know about.

There, the man who tells tourists about putting fluids into small ziplocked bags gave me one but accompanied me to the security checkpoint to argue on my behalf that I should not have to throw away my duty-free items from Los Angeles airport. Strictly speaking, they should have been tossed because I had come out of the "sterile area" in order not to miss my flight by waiting in a long line at the connecting desk. But the man argued for me in eloquent fashion and the security people first looked skeptical, then shrugged, then nodded and waved me through, for his sake, I'm sure.

I could hear the voice of the man's American counterpart in my ear: "I don't make the rules, ma'am!"