Stuff English Does: How It Started
A Reenchantment Project
Hello! I’m back online, after a long hiatus, ranting once again about the wondrous Stuff English Does (a project that is part of the Reenchantment Cafe). From asskickery and avocado-hand to zumbathons and zenning out … through boohoo barriers and fatbergs, moos and dougalists, techno tots, humblebrags, moronic acid…
I could go on and on (and I will).
But let’s start at the beginning.
When I was small, in the 1950s, I made up words.
There was the Moo, a hideous monster that would come lumbering down our street, making a horrible deafening roar. I would run inside the house and hide, fingers stuck in ears, until it had gone past and its racket had faded. I now know that this huge contraption bristling with enormous tentacles was a vacuum sewer cleaner.
There were the Looknames - Downbronze Lou, Juggian Alan, Procet Pop – which somehow put into words the unique countenances of, respectively, an uncle, a cousin and one of my grandads.
And there were the dougalists (pronounced doogalist), which fully entered the family lexicon. A dougalist is a sort of twisty pointy sticky-up thing that I would see on churches and other public buildings, and the cathedral of my city. The word dougalist, in some way I couldn’t (and still can’t) explain, embodied what for infant me was the essence of, well, this twisty pointy thingamajig.
Later, at grammar school, I fell in love with Latin.
Boom!
Iudex. Radix. Rex. Flos.
It. Just. Clicked. As if I’d always known it. (I now assume I had numerous lives during Roman times).
Each ‘I get it!’ was the linguist’s equivalent of the thrill described by Dr Bruce Lipton when, as a small boy, he looked down a microscope for the very first time:
‘And then it happened, an event so dramatic that it would set the course for the rest of my life. A paramecium swam into the field. I was mesmerised. […] My whole being was transfixed […]’
Languages became my passion; I went on to learn Ancient Greek, and taught myself Italian, Spanish and later Catalan. The final year of my Classics degree was packed with thrills, too. While my course-mates were busy specialising in Roman law, archaeology or classical literature, I was blissed out in an abstruse heaven with the history of Latin and Greek, and Indo-European linguistics. The centum-satem isogloss? Sanskrit and Old Church Slavonic cognates? Nasal infixes? Bring them on.
But my plan to hang out in Proto-Indo-European nirvana for another three years – i.e. do my PhD – didn’t work out.
Plan B - ‘I just wanna speak languages’ – was to teach English in Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil… After a cursory training in London, in 1973, I started a job here in Barcelona. And stayed. Life happened – in Spanish and Catalan. I taught English to mostly beginners, burned out, studied Spanish lang and lit at Barcelona University, became a translator, burned out again, started writing…
Fast forward to 1995, when I finally peered down the microscope at my own language.
The moment of re-enchantment.
I had just been offered what turned out to be my dream freelance job with SpeakUp Movies – a regular gig that brought together all my skills – teacher, translator, writer and researcher (of course I didn’t realise that at the time). I almost chickened out. But I accepted and ended up doing it for 15 years.
SpeakUp Movies was a brilliant and highly successful initiative of SpeakUp Magazine (a general interest magazine for Spanish-speaking learners of English). Every month they released an original-version movie with subtitles (in English – word for word transcript).
Our job (I alternated with another person, a teacher and film buff) was to write the accompanying SpeakUp Movie Guide, a booklet designed to make the whole thing comprehensible. Half of the booklet consisted of an English-Spanish Glossary which included not only translations but notes (in English) on anything we thought needed explanation or clarification: jokes, expletives, non-standard grammar, difficult sentences, idioms, regionialisms, slang, cultural references...
My first film was ‘The Remains of the Day’. I started diffidently to draw up the bilingual word list. I had no idea what might need a special explanation and what might not. Then one of the characters mentioned a ‘pop-up toaster’.
I could simply have put the literal translation tostadora automática in the glossary and moved on. But even though I hadn’t taught English for fifteen years, I could almost hear the bemused student voices:
‘Why not automatical? What means pop-up? Why? ¿Porqué?’
Back I went to the dictionary. (This, by the way, was pre-internet, before the online pop-up became an everyday irritant to millions across the world).
For ‘pop-up book’ it suggested libro móbil, libro mecánico or the longwinded libro con ilustraciones en relieve. But pop-up was so vivid, so visual and auditory, so snappy, so fun. So playful. How to put that over?
‘To pop up is a good example of the kind of vivid phrasal verb English is so fond of,’ I wrote. ‘Pop’ conveys the idea of rapid motion. The toast therefore pops up from the toaster. Here the verb has become an adjective.’
What was even more fascinating was chasing down the origins of the word, to Middle English ‘poppen’, clearly imitative, a small explosion. Pop goes the weasel. Snap, crackle and pop. Balloons pop – or we pop them. We pop in and out of places, we pop up and down the stairs, we pop around to our neighbour, or over to the pub.
We do it to stuff, too: we pop pills, pop lunch in the microwave and the baby in its cot.
Ideas or words or bits of music pop into our minds, our eyes pop out of our heads, our ears pop when our plane descends.
The lines between noun, verb and adjective get blurry. Popcorn. Popeye the sailor man. Pop-ups, popovers. and pop-unders.
As the Pringles slogan goes: ‘Once you pop, the fun doesn’t stop.’
It was almost like the language is playing.
And that’s how Stuff English Does was born.
What words have you created? What words play obsessively in your head? Do you recall any aha! language moments? Tell us in the comments. and help co-create this space, the first room of The Reenchantment Cafe to open its doors.
Delighted you are back! As an English major (US) and a lifelong writer and reader, I have also always loved language--though I'll confess I didn't love Latin, but I did like it and am still grateful for having learned it in high school. Looking forward to more of stuff English does!
I used to say I was scrundled when my hormones used to get the better of me. Lovely to see you here. 💜