..as my Latin teacher for the last two excruciating years of Latin - and so I found it expedient, if not absolutely necessary to become a conniving plagiarist rather than bear the brunt of Harry’s ire or, God help me, actually do some serious study.
It was in my last year of Latin when I discovered that there was an English translation of Caesar’s Invasion of Britain available at Whitcombe & Tombs that the penny dropped. I found I had a knack for changing just enough of the text to make it look original and I didn’t even had to resort to referring to the Latin text! Harry stayed off my back for the entire year and even my dramatic failure in the exams, annotated in red ink with a despairing ‘What happened?’ was a small price to pay.
Of course, when you cheat, the person you’re really cheating is yourself, and if there are any secondary or tertiary students reading this, what the hell do you think you’re doing?
In any case, this wasn’t just going to be a tract about my slothful school days, but it was going to be about language and languages. The subject or subjects came up recently when we attended a birthday luncheon with the Drs Sellers as it was indeed Margaret Sellers’ birthday. Despite the usual audio competition with other diners for chatting space we did manage to conduct a fairly comprehensive ramble of the usual subjects appropriate to our age i.e. superannuation, fracking, government bureaucracy, corporate power, Tony Rabid and Smilin’ Joe Hockeysticks among them. I considered introducing constipation to the agenda but decided in favour of less gruesome topics given that we were eating fine French fare at the time.
I think we were on the subject of bureaucracy and were discussing how it seems to be that people in the public service are deliberately moved out of their areas of expertise. I’d mentioned that when Ariel moved from EMI to CBS they had a policy of hiring only sales reps who knew nothing at all about music. Dr Wazz said that’s known as ‘provider capture’, which useful term I promptly forgot and had to text him just now to find out. (Sigh!)
I think ultimately it’s going to lead to the bleak kinds of worlds portrayed in Orwell's 1984 and the underrated Gilliam movie Brazil - i.e. bean counters rule. (Incidentally, I was shocked to read of Bob Hoskins’ death recently. Bob played a significant role in Brazil. I wasn’t so shocked that he had died – more that I hadn’t heard of it on TV or radio. Such is B-grade fame I guess).
Ukraine got a mention and it might’ve been at this point I ventured that if there was only the one universal language the planet would be much the better for it.
There wasn’t much opposition put up to this not exactly new idea. It’s hard to know if this was because by now the noise level was so intense that nobody actually heard what I said or we were all simply too tired by this point to take up the cudgel for any notional cause Anyway, the waiter’s routine of caramelising the sugar on the crème brulée at the table with a blowtorch temporarily took our minds off all the world’s problems.
I had one more stab at resuscitating the discussion, mentioning John Lennon’s Imagine and pointing out that his disingenuous ideal of globalisation is being subverted simultaneously by nationalism and regionalism which would probably be the fate of a concerted move towards one language anyway.
Strangely enough, I don’t remember there being a verse in Imagine about one common language. Had there been, it might’ve gone something like this..

Imagine there’s one language..
Understood by all
No need to fear rejection
No need for fear at all
I hope one day you’ll join us
Singing the same song

Maybe an old dream, but you’ve got to imagine (!) it’s attainable. You might’ve gathered I’m all for it – as long of course as it’s English..



*I've had an immediate response from the birthday girl, Dr Marg Sellers, quite rightly asserting I neglected to mention her contribution to the languge discussion.

…Was it that you weren’t listening or what - "it might’ve been at this point I ventured that if there was only the one universal language the planet would be much the better for it. There wasn’t much opposition put up to this not exactly new idea.” My point – obviously not well-expressed - was while a common language might be a nice idea how would that work across cultures – when language is the vehicle for communicating the many and varied concepts that belong to any one culture – concepts often not part of another culture…??? Sometimes we can cobble together lengthy explanations; other times the concept is so foreign to our cultural understanding that we remain speechless – literally…
Examples? Elude me (holes in head problem)…but never hard to find them in some of my very culturally diverse classes…students from non-Western cultures have no problem in giving examples to the rest of us…
Must have been the blowtorch interruption – and the subsequent discussion of how creme caramel was first burnt – always with a blowtorch…???