Daily Archives: October 8, 2006

The Little Café… is out of beer!

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Three taps may not sound like a lot to those on the other side of the pond, but this is a land of specialization. Three taps is about the maximum, except in tourist places. You choose your pub based on the beer you want to drink. One thing you always know is that the beer you drink will be fresh, because everyone in the bar will be drinking the same beer. A bar with many taps is met with suspicion. How long has that keg of Olde Snake Bite been tapped?

Which is all well and good, as long as there’s another keg waiting when the first runs out.

I asked for a Stella, and Wendy shook her head. “We have no beer,” she said in English. It took me a moment to digest that. “All three,” she said. “None.”

“Are the taps broken?” I asked.

“No, they’ve all been… I don’t know how to say…”

“Drunk,” I said. It’s not surprising she had a hard time with that word, as she knows it as an adjective that is applied to people. “Drunk up,” I added, not helpfully.

Little Café Near Home has been popular, lately. It’s been filled with a younger crowd, so when school starts to exert its fearsome grip on the souls of the nation’s youth, things might quiet down a bit here. While I wish the owner of this place all the success in the world, I’m kind of hoping the chain-smoking children who are noisily drinking the place dry get distracted by other pursuits.

The bar is out of beer. This is the Czech Republic. This should, quite simply, not be possible. In this country I imagine there is a room with rows of people staring into glowing monitors. At the front of the room is the Big Board, which shows the flow of beer throughout the nation. Right now there should be a giant red X flashing over this neighborhood while a klaxon sounds. People are screaming into their phones, and the army is mobilizing. A pub without beer. This is a national crisis.

I will keep one ear cocked for the sound of the helicopters making the emergency delivery, but in the meantime I’ll go next door and have some Budvar.

Thanks!

Disdeclined

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In Czech, there are seven forms for every noun and pronoun. These different forms provide important information about the relationships between the elements of the sentence. In English, most of those forms have been weeded out over the centuries, replaced by helper words and word order conventions. We still have the possessive form and the plural, but that’s it.

Except in pronouns. Now I call the English-speaking world to action, to hasten the inevitable and beat down those who would hold our language in stasis. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do. Let’s put the wooden stake through the heart of ‘whom’. No ambiguity is introduced when you use ‘who’ instead, English has developed all the mechanisms to keep the sentence clear without declining the pronoun. We just don’t need whom.

While we’re at it, let’s not stop there. I, me, my — it’s time to straighten all this out. We only need one pronoun to express the first person singular. All we need is ‘me’. “Me Tarzan, you Jane” is not at all ambiguous, and even introduces an implied ‘to be’ which can come in handy. “All for me grog” is not open to alternate interpretations. All these extra pronouns running about are causing more harm than good.

Granted, getting rid of ‘my’ may be pushing things a bit much, as English still uses the possessive form. If we really want to disdecline the language, we would have to resort to using ‘of’ a lot: “the pants of Jerry”, rather than “Jerry’s pants” (in the phrase “Jerry pants” mine name comes out as an adjective). Me not quite ready for that. Before you know it people would be writing “pants o’Jerry”, and the possessive would be back, only this time an o’ prefix rather than an ‘s at the end. Even so, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ could be consolidated without any loss. It’s already happened for nouns and most other pronouns. Kiss ‘my’ goodbye, and flush ‘yours’ down the drain.

These silly pronouns are holding us back. They remain mired in days gone by, the subjects of rules that are based simply on properness, not effectiveness — all they do is prove you paid attention in school. (Ironically, one pronoun we already have shed, ‘thee’, would still be useful to reduce ambiguity. Me therefore also call for the recognition of y’all to be what ‘you’ once was.)

Me not ready to embrace this principle in me everyday writing, as, alas, there are many who would judge me based on outdated ideas of correctness. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? If me were to go it alone, me would be quickly written off as an ignorant buffoon, not a force committed to making the English language better. What can me do?

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Thanks!