I was always rather smug about the way I spoke. Not my accent, so much as the words I used. Or rather didn't use. I had grown up in the 1960s, when middle-class parents were fighting a rearguard action against what they called "sloppy speech." This meant a ban on all slang and abbreviated expressions which were galloping through British post-war culture. So in our house we didn't say "OK" (American), "telly" (lazy), or "lino" (don't know why-we just didn't). We asked after other people's "mothers" not "mums," and we didn't say "hi" or "bye."
My parents always maintained that this was nothing to do with class. Anyone, they said, could speak clean, classic English, regardless of whether they sounded like Wilfred Pickles or, indeed, my Welsh-accented father. They were wrong, of course. The acquisition of high-status language by those born outside it has everything to do with access to particular kinds of education-in my father's case (and probably Wilfred Pickles too), to the local grammar school. But the aim, I still thought, was a noble one. I liked the idea of speaking a language which transcended the merely fashionable. I had no desire to sound like the sad schoolteachers I knew in the late 1970s, who still sounded like refugees from the Summer of Love.
What I was aiming for was a kind of timeless language which didn't place me in any particular age or class. A language which was correct but not ostentatiously so. A language which would neither make bullying claims over others, nor yet feel inadequate in the company of the grand or the clever. A language which you could take anywhere.
And for a long time it did me nicely. The words I used got me through an education which consisted of both public and comprehensive school, without anyone taking much notice. It did me proud at university, even coping rather well on those tricky occasions when I had to dine at High Table with old lady dons who sounded like Battle of Britain pilots. It took me into magazine journalism, that strange place where posh girls and dustmen's daughters work together for a pittance. While my colleagues gobbled up and spat out expressions like "fab," "brilliant," and "darling, you're a star," and then dropped them just as quickly, I stuck to my classic vocabulary and secretly hoped that people appreciated the difference.
But then one day, last year, I had a nasty shock. By now I was in my late thirties and teaching at a Midlands university, still rather pleased with the way I spoke. I had got through the 1990s without saying "creative," "zeitgeist" or "anorak" (except when I went hill-walking). Anyway, an undergraduate had asked me to look at a short story she had written, and I was giving it back to her, complete with notes. The main problem, I said, was the dialogue, which didn't sound realistic at all. Surely her characters, a group of middle-class young people, wouldn't speak in a kind of Leicester version of gangsta rap?
The student looked at me for a bit, not so much in anger as in sorrow. "You said that about the last story I showed you," she said gently. Then she added, as nicely as she knew how, "You see, Kathryn, I think the problem is that you just don't speak like a normal person."
I felt a nauseous rush. I had thought I was speaking my lovely, unobtrusive, subtle yet classic English-when in fact I sounded like a ghostly presence from an earlier age. Clearly I was no different from my grandparents who in the 1980s led perfectly normal lives, going to Sainsbury's and talking to people at bus stops, yet using phrases which made them sound as if they had stepped out of a Terence Rattigan play. They regularly asked passers-by if they were "on leave" (holiday), what their "people" (parents) did for a living, and whether petrol for the motor car wasn't too dear.
I realise now that you can't freeze language. Or rather, if you do, then it's your decision to stay stuck while everyone else moves on, leaving you not timeless but time warped. The problem then becomes, how to update? Having missed out on four decades of vernacular, I thought I might sound odd if I plonked myself down in the present without limbering up a little. All kinds of confusions can arise if you get ahead of your contemporaries. My five-year-old godson tells me that "fat" is now the thing to say if you like something. But if I started handing out "fat" as a compliment, I would end up with a very thin social life.
Nor do I think I can launch straight in with "pants"-the newest word if you think something is rubbish. (Who decides these updated meanings is a mystery; the pat answer is that they come from the cartoon South Park. But South Park is American and in America "pants" means trousers.)
I could let my guard down and allow new words to sneak into my vocabulary through my unconscious. This is what my mother did. Once her child-rearing days were over, she developed a strange polyglot speech which reflected her various colliding existences. Now in her mid-sixties, she has begun to refer to all men as "guys," which seems ironic, given that she spent her childhood being told to have nothing to do with GIs for fear of some ghastly cultural contamination. And she has become coarse too. Last year she routinely started saying "bum" for bottom. No matter how hard I try, I will never be able to do that.
On reflection, I think that the middle way is best. I will neither linger in my time warp, nor suddenly start talking like Zoë Ball. My strategy, over the past year, has been to choose a couple of new words which might fit into my daily language. Then I audition them, slipping them in to see if anyone notices. After a while I find that the new words bed down nicely, becoming almost automatic. And before you know where you are, you've developed a personal language which sounds truly contemporary-yet still, I suspect, the object of appalled fascination to anyone under 25.
