Our speaker was Adam Henderson, our editor Ursula’s son. His subject was a very live one : the speaking of English and its effect upon the stratification of society. He began with a question bound to elicit some ribaldry : “who here speaks without an accent?” As we know, we have some who speak with rare perfection, and some who should only be allowed to speak their first language. Adam’s thesis however was based upon sound research arising from theatre and personal experiences gleaned from a life lived in New York, the United States (the two are different, you know), England, and, of course that country of dragomans, Canada.
When only ten years old, Adam was transplanted from New York to Winnipeg, which he described as a ‘delight’ after the big and scary Big Apple. For a good while he evidently found himself the odd person out of the mainstream, but before long realized that this was because he by then spoke a different language. His Mother expressed interest in the Manitoba Community Theatre and Adam quickly showed the same artistic preferences, a move which on the one hand drew him closer to his Father (who had always secretly wished to act) but at the same drew Adam further from his parents’ medical and scientific lives. However, he never looked back in his career choice, in which he said with delight that you could earn literally hundreds of dollars!
His experiences took him to England, in particular to Bristol (once the second city of England) and found out what mattered in that highly structured society : how one spoke. The ‘educated’ accent is not something learned, but is instilled by a nation inured to the nuances of, mostly, irony. This subtle instrument of language is redolent of how to say what you mean while saying the exact opposite (English lawyers, for example, know that “with respect” means “I think that you are wrong” and that “with the greatest of respect” means “where on earth did you get that stupid idea?”). For this, and of course other reasons, English has some ten times the sounds of such hidebound languages as French (which a committee has to manage) and German (which explains by simply adding more syllables to each word). There are no spelling bees in any country that does not speak English.
Adam worked for a while in BBC repertory, and he noted how there were so many British actors who could command a huge variety of personae with the most minor of physical changes : watching PBS and the Knowledge Network, as most of our members do, simply illustrates the virtuosity of so few actors - there being no parts that seem impossible to find someone to fully embrace. In the UK the language is of the stage and radio ; in the US it is the language of advertising. While London is a tough place to work, it gave him a new perspective on Canadian society, its different social understanding of language, and the great advantages that, right now, Canada enjoys in the cultural - particularly cinematic - scenario of North America’s social mosaic. In the US entertainment milieu the bad guys speak impeccably, the good guys speak the language of the streets.
As George Bernard Shaw said, “ the only thing that divides the English from the Americans is the language”.
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