Kazi Shahid Shawkat
It is really hope-inspiring that with the increased demand of English as a language of communication both in academic and employment environment in our country, the percentage of people using this language efficiently is also rising dramatically. It is no more surprising as well now-a-days when you see a middle aged employee going to language classes not for personal interest, but for promotion prospect or for catering to the newly emerged urgency in the current job. The mounting circulation of the English newspapers also bears the testimony to how positive the overall trend is. However, like many other Asian people, despite all the pragmatic applications of English as a communicative language, it is both amusing and sad to observe how many of us have been recurrently making some wrong uses of English words and phrases. The mistaken uses are so popular that even the correct use of them is considered as gross mistakes. Well, these things happen in every language.
The two most popular mistakes are probably the use of HOTEL and LIBRARY in the kind of sentences like ‘I had my lunch at a nearby hotel’ or ‘I am going to the library to buy some books’. A native speaker will surely find these sentences too difficult to understand since hotels are not places for eating and no libraries in the world sell books. Shouldn’t we try to go to a RESTAURANT for meal and to a BOOKSTALL for buying books? Now if you look over the restaurants and libraries of your town and try to match the signboards declaring what they are— you will get a pleasant surprise! How long has this bizarre culture been practised dauntlessly? Who knows!
Many of us still think that the reply to ‘How do you do?’ is ‘Fine, thanks’ because ‘How do you do’ and ‘How are you’ are homogenous in meaning. But in reality ‘How do you do?’ is a greeting sentence usually used during getting acquainted with someone and the reply is as it is: ‘How do you do?’. It sounds like HI or HELLO. It makes no sense indeed to translate this as ‘kemon aso?’. Then let us consider the use of TAKE in ‘She is going to take an exam.’ Now, you really cannot blame anyone who understands that she is a teacher. Because in Bengali TAKE means neya. But in this sentence ‘take exam’ means ‘sit for the exam’ while ‘to give exam’ is the responsibility of a teacher. Again, there are some words/phrases many of us use in everyday conversation like ‘departmental store’, ‘electric bill’ ‘footpath’ ‘go marketing’, ‘more superior than somebody/something’ ‘take a decision’, ‘discuss about the matter’, ‘last morning/afternoon/evening’, ‘He got married with his cousin’, I am accustomed with working late at night’, which all are but great mistakes. A department store might belong to a department, (which makes it departmental) but definitely not all them are so. And if the bill is ever electric, it must be run by electricity; please say electricity bill. The meaning of footpath is usually a country road; the kind of roads that wind down the villages, but the thing we want to mean is actually ‘sidewalk’ or ‘pavement’. And let’s note the rest of the corrections— go shopping, ‘superior to somebody/something’, ‘make a decision’, ‘discuss the matter’, ‘yesterday (in the) morning/afternoon/evening’, ‘he got married to his cousin’ and ‘I am accustomed to working late at night’ instead.
A few days back someone wrote a mail to me asking for a CD. She wrote, ‘Since my pc got a heard disc crash, I have lost all my important data including the audio for meditation. Do you have an audio of that kind? I hardly need it.’ Now, at a general glance you may not notice the flawed part in the sentences of the letter. But it is the very last sentence ‘I hardly need it’ that means ‘I rarely need it’ which goes totally contradictory to the sense produced by the earlier sentences. ‘I greatly need it’ could have been all right. Similarly, ‘He works hardly’ will be ‘He works hard’. Here ‘Hard’ and ‘Hardly’ both are adverbs, but the former is an adverb of manner, while the later is an adverb of frequency. I can also remember calling a tool ‘plus’ until a few years back. Do you know what it actually is? It is ‘pliers’. What about half pants? When I was younger, I used to wear half pants. Well, I am sorry; it is short pant. Can you imagine what it would be like if there were a real half pant in the world and you had to wear it?
Apart from the misuses and wrong uses of English words/phrases, we also are careless regarding the pronunciation. There are a lot of words we have been mispronouncing for ages and never felt the urge to look up and find the phonetic transcription. Would you please try pronouncing the following words and then check with the help of a Cambridge or Oxford talking dictionary? Here they are: Rendezvous, learned (adj), saliva, blimey, stifle, comfortable, invitation, castle, debut, comfy, difference, loose, lose, visa, sugar, leisure, laser, shed, shade, residence.
Mistakes are made by all of us. Sometimes they are made as the most undesirable by the most reliable. Nobody should be shocked to see even a minister or a scholar make mistakes because those are accidental, slip of tongue. That is the reason why a few days back, following a sudden lay-off in some of our garment factories, when I heard one of our ministers (while talking to TV men) using the word ‘lay-out’ to mean ‘lay off’, believe me, I was not shocked and surprised! We all believe in the maxim— To err is human.
Let us make mistakes and learn from them. In fact, we are not committing any crimes. I do not know who this wise man was who said, ‘Success is the distance between two mistakes’, but I salute him. And finally, I do expect that at least before celebrating the next ‘International Mother Language Day’ we can make sure that we do not make the wrong use of any English and of course our mother tongue Bengali.