Everywhere White Car!

The driver chuckled as I buckled my seatbelt. He had seen me climb into the wrong car, and hastily climb out of it, before identifying his vehicle as the Uber I’d ordered. “Everywhere white car!” he laughed. I smiled wanly. (These mistakes happen. In my case, quite often.) “Everywhere white car!” he repeated, as if his joke deserved more but had been lost in translation.

I’m depressed. My son’s Early Reader book broke me with the line, “I pack further food.” “There is no such thing as further food,” I wailed. “You can make food go further. When you break bread, and share it with your brother, you make your food go further. But there is no such thing as further food.” I wrote an angry note in his reading record.

“You can aim further, you can reach further, you can further an argument,” I continued, as we hurried to school, but further food is meaningless. It’s worse than meaningless, it is wrong.”

“Further food, further food!” my sons sang, delighted at my distress, as they skipped towards the gates. There, I could hear the cosmopolitan elite exchanging limited descriptions of mini breaks in Dubai; and felt worse.

The lingua franca is in free fall. Our language is disintegrating, at its base and at its peak, and gross elementary errors will hollow out its middle.

Of course, other people have other languages. Rich traditions are protected even within the city walls by the fact that fewer people understand them. They escape the educationalists. Or so I thought, until the nail technician confessed, as I cooed over her new baby, that she’s been told by the midwives et al, to give up Vietnamese to “help” her children.

“Barbarism! Sacrilege! You can’t surrender your gold backed mother tongue for the fiat currency of an English as a Foreign language proficiency certificate!” I howled. “And we wouldn’t be able to speak to my mother,” she submitted quietly. “But that’s the only plus,” I continued firmly, “Your grammar, your vocabulary, your tonality, aren’t yours to sacrifice, they’re your responsibility to impart!”

It matters. Language is our means of holding our own, it’s how we think, how we understand and make ourselves understood, it’s our defence against deception. If no one can string a sensical sentence together in the international airport that is our capital city, we will all be reduced to symbols and signage. The only choice on such a bleak horizon is TOILET or EXIT.