Expat Living: "Mucking up the English language"

Philip Larkin

Don't trust this guy alone

with your language!

(Image from channel4.com)

Well, that time has again come around, when what goes around comes around, namely, another of my Expat language columns packing a rounder to wallop a bounder on the chin.

I refer to the weakly double-chinned fellow above.

Ordinarily, one should not speak ill of the dead, who aren't around to talk back, but Mr. Larkin's poetry still raises a ruckus, so I'll make an exception in larrupin' Larkin's case.

Ladies and gentlemen . . . my rejoinder to the man and one of his poems:

Mucking up the English language

An assiduous reader has kindly informed me that my column on profane expressions utterly misconstrues the meaning of fuggedaboudit, which is neither profane nor derived from Norman Mailer's fugging novel, "The Naked and the Dead."

Turns out that in fuggedaboudit, the first six letters express not the past participle of Mailer's fug but a slangy pronunciation of forget and thus do not spell out the decline of Anglo-Saxon culture at all.

One might suspect slangy terms like fuggedaboudit as evidence of linguistic decline ... but forget about it. Norman Mailer is not the culprit anyway. I have uncovered a different dead white male whose canonical literary work bears responsibility for the current debasement of our language: Philip Larkin.

I know, I know. Readers will tell me that Larkin's poem "This Be the Verse" does not grease the skids of our decline but merely expresses our slippage. That argument, however, fails as fallaciously as the argument that gangsta rap merely expresses the reality of ghetto violence but does not advocate it, though everybody knows sure as shootin' that gansta rap glorifies street violence.

Indeed, the former argument fails even more egregiously, for Larkin's poem does not merely cite the "f word," it actively uses that word -- as if gangsta rappers were to fire off uzis on stage to enhance their performances.

Those who have never read Larkin's verse may imagine that I exaggerate, so allow me to quote his profane poem in full, excepting a minor bowdlerization in the offending word:

This Be the Verse

They f--- you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.

But they were f----- up in their turn
By fools in old style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself.

No kids? As if that would stop our descent when it would in fact effect our terminal decline. Well, fight fire with fire, I always say, so I have composed my own little poem of unfriendly fire aimed in Larkin's direction:

This Be the Worse

When Philip Larkin wrote, that cad,
In nineteen-seventy-f------ -two,
He fouled me with the fault he had
Of saying well what isn't true.

But he was f----- up in his turn
From closely cultivating oats
That he had wildly sown to learn
What he could then shove down our throats.

"Man hands on misery to man"?
His own sits there upon my shelf.
"Get out as early as you can"?
At least he had no kids himself.

Lest pedants once again correct me on a point that I know full well, let me admit that Larkin wrote his poem in nineteen-seventy-one, but that would destroy my rhyme scheming, and given the choice between a pedant's accuracy and saying well what isn't true, I prefer the latter. Besides, I have poetic licentiousness and can do as I will.

Licentiousness, regrettably, is not liberty, and trapped in this prison house of language, I reflect upon my own linguistic crime of passion and perceive that I stand guilty of the very thing for which I have accused Larkin. In St. Paul's apt words: "Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things."

Peccavi. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Jeffery is a professor at Kyung Hee University and can be reached through his blog Gypsy Scholar at gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com -- Ed.

So it goes, "Mucking up the English language," and you can also read it online in the Expat Living section at the Korea Herald site . . . if you can find it there in spite of the website's bugginess.