• “Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert”.

• “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”

• “Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither”.

• “Prithee, pretty maiden, tell me true”.

Each contains words that some might have difficulty defining. A whole generation has grown up with other language problems, not understanding, for example, that the word ‘man’ is a generic as well as gender specific term and to think that calling someone an ‘actress’ is ‘sexist’.

Thus far, there has been no demand that the Queen be called King Elizabeth even though the first Elizabeth did on occasion style herself “your Prince”. For the purpose of greater gender equality are our daughters eventually to be called our ‘sons’? Is that on the ‘non-genderspeak’ agenda? Happily, I still get a laugh when a thoughtful woman holds open for me a door that she (surely not ‘he’?) has just entered and I say, “Thank you; you are a gentleman”.

Returning to the quotations, a taxicab is about the only thing one ‘hails’ nowadays. Nobody says “Thou never wert” , “Wherefore art thou?” or “Prithee” anymore. So, wherefore my concern? Even a generation ago few of my students understood that Juliet Capulet was not enquiring about Romeo’s whereabouts by asking, “Wherefore art thou?”. She was, after all, looking directly at him from her window. Forgetting that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, she was saying, ”Why must you be Romeo, one of those despicable Montagues”?

Prithee (pray thee, i.e. please), wert (were) and hither (here) are part of what George Orwell would call ‘oldspeak’. Some of us regret that so many poetic old words have been lost. It is sufficiently disappointing to hear faulty efforts to imitate ‘Tudorese’ but to lose words like ‘hark’ as in “Hark, hark, the lark” or “Hark, the herald angels sing” is sad.

The same applies to ‘fie’, that old f-word expressing contempt or disgust. Although one does not now expect to hear a waitress called a wench, there are nevertheless many other words that might well be brought back from the vocabulary recycle bin, e.g. ‘drumble’ (to act sluggishly), ‘deedless’ (inactive), ‘childness’ (juvenile behaviour).

This is not an appeal for the recovery in everyday speech of the ‘thees’ and ’thous’ of the North York Quaker pioneers. Imagine hearing “I have a concern for thee; thee and I must talk ere long”. Yes, yes, that should have been “thou and I”. That is partly my point. Few can still use the ‘doth’, ‘doeth’,‘ doest’, ‘hath done’ and so on of ‘oldspeak’ properly. The result is that traditional poetry and many fine old hymns employ what seems almost to be a foreign language.

It would be sufficiently unfortunate to live in a cultural context where few were any longer able to appreciate Shakespeare. As we approach next year’s 400th anniversary of the 1611 King James version of the Bible another dimension of cultural deprivation is evident. There are those who appreciate the KJV less than they do the essays of Kahlil Gibran who says with pseudo-scriptural sonority what is usually better said elsewhere.

It is true that the translators four centuries ago did not have much of the ancient source material now available and that some English words have changed their meaning. For example, the word ‘conversation’ in (KJV) Philippians 3:20 meant ‘citizenship’ in 1611. It is the cadence, the rhythmic flow of words, that is absent in newer translations. But then Scripture, except for the psalms, is an urgent message rather than poetry. It was written by people who were either in transit or in prison.

For the preservation of what is best in ‘oldspeak’, look to the importance of acquainting the young with our great poets. Balance lines 1 and 3 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 67:

Ah, wherefore with infection should he live / That sin by him advantages should achieve? - against a contemporary translation - “Why should he live surrounded by such corruption / that evil people have the benefit of knowing him?”.

Like all living things, language changes with time. Who any longer calls the telephone ‘the blower’ or says “We had a ‘swell’ time in Vancouver”? But I am told that it is not uncommon for contemporary actors to declaim on stage lines that they do not actually understand. Whose fault is it that they do not understand our, and their own, linguistic heritage?

There is also the problem of confusing the meaning of one word with that of another. For example, ‘disinterested’ means ‘unbiased by personal interests’ while ‘uninterested’ means ‘not at all interested’. Someone said that anybody who doesn’t know the difference between them should be brought before an uninterested judge in court.

Just recently the English language acquired its millionth dictionary approved word. The process of influence by or direct acquisition from another language has been going on since Julius Caesar set foot in Celtic Britain in 54 B.C. Since then Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Norman French and more recent languages have continually (not ‘continuously’) refashioned the age-old root vocabulary of all Indo-European people.

It is interesting to see how early and how easily children learn a language, including its misuse, from their elders. That is why elocution training is important as they progress beyond home influence. In that regard, films, radio and television have been a mixed blessing.

As the universities and, much later, the BBC once influenced the standardisation of regional variations of English, so now the electronic media have an unfortunate impact on our use of words.

Oldspeak, newspeak and wellspeak keep uneasy company in our ‘polyculture’. Whatever equal opportunity is promised by employers to minorities among us, in cases of otherwise equal qualifications preference will usually be given to the ‘best spoken’ applicant. Do all teachers remember that?

A recent e-mail asked, “Tiered of been passed over for promotion?” (misspelling theirs). It advertised a questionable 4-6 week “degree program”. Fie!