Fousesquawk on the English Language

I have spent the last 20 years of my life as a teacher; the first 5 as a trainer in DEA's Office of Training in Quantico; then as an English as a second language teacher after I retired from government. I love teaching, and the more I teach English, the more fascinated I have become with the richness of our English language, a richness that can be frustrating to the foreign learner.

For example, we have 15 verb tenses in English, whereas many Asian languages have only one. In English we can usually express through our verb tenses whether an action happened in the past, now or future, if it is still in progress, was in progress, will be in progress, whether it happened before another action in the past, or will happen before another action in the future.


Take the past perfect tense, for example. In the sentence;

"We had eaten lunch by the time John arrived", we know that the verb in the past perfect (had eaten) occurred before John arrived (which is simple past). In that sentence, use of the past perfect is needed to express which action happened first. Of course, if you use words like "before" or "after", then the past perfect is unnecessary. Senator John Kerry, one of our great elocutionists, illustrated this perfectly when he said this (note the dramatic effect Kerry's use of language has on the gentleman with the red cap in the front row):




Imagine the confusion had he said,

"I actually did vote for the 87 million when I voted against it."

Would this not be a lot clearer?

"I had actually voted for the 87 million by the time I voted against it."



Another feature that English has is the "to be" verb, which many languages do not possess. Usually, the meaning of the word makes the sentence perfectly clear. For example;

"John is an American".

"I am sick".

However, one who is a master with the English language can manipulate the meaning so as to create subtle nuances. Bill Clinton, for example, one of America's most noted linguists....



Stop that! This is a family blog.

...as I was saying, well, you can listen for yourselves.


Oh, and don't worry about repeating the word "is" directly after "is". In that sentence, it was perfectly grammatical and made perfect sense.

Another facet of English is all those words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. No less than the great British statesman Neville Chamberlain, a native English speaker, got the words, "piece" and "peace" confused in 1938, when returning from talks with Hitler in Germany, he waved a piece of paper in his hand and declared "peace in our time".



One of the most confusing linguistic tricks English-speakers, especially Americans utilize is the deliberate statement of one thing to mean the opposite. To Asians, this is especially baffling. To most Asians, they interpret what we say in English as what we mean. Americans on the other hand, (again unlike many Asians) use non-verbal language, body language and facial expressions to convey the real meaning. Here again, we note Bill Clinton, a master of this technique. (Pay close attention to the lips.)

Did you catch the lips?

Here's another example when former President Gerald Ford, in a debate with Jimmy Carter, made his clever observations about Poland and the Soviet Union.

Of course, the untrained moderator was unable to read Ford's facial expressions and body language, which clearly showed he meant the exact opposite of what he said, and was thus, misquoted (perhaps deliberately) by the biased news media.

That's right.


When I was a trainer in DEA, one of the speaking techniques that I was taught was the so-called "pregnant pause". That is instead of shouting out your point, you pause in order to draw in your audience so as to make your point more effectively. Here is a very recent example brilliantly executed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.




One of the great misconceptions about English is that it doesn't lend itself to great heights of oratory-or even demogogery- as does German, so masterfully used by Hitler and Goebbels. Actually, English can stand toe to toe with German any day as exemplified by Al Gore.



Yes, our English language is a very rich, yet subtle language indeed. So let's raise a glass to English with a Fousesquawk toast.

Prosit!