They’ve gone and done it now

To the surprise of its native speakers, English is one of the hardest languages to learn.

It’s odd. English doesn't offer the multiple declensions that students of German must master. Nor does it have an additional nine, hard-to-pronounce letters, like Polish. There is a common belief that the English language has more words than any other, but that's simply untrue: its 500,000 words fall way short of the 1,100,000 words that Koreans have to deal with, or the 800,000 that Finns can muster.

(Indeed, Finns have so many words they can devote one in particular — Kalsarikänni, or ‘pantsdrunk’ — to describe the act of drinking at home in your underwear, a form of recreation you may have thought didn’t deserve its own word, although we’ve all done it. More so perhaps in 2020.)

No, English is difficult to learn because of the shocking inconsistency in when, where, how and why its half a million words are used. This surely is an accurate reflection of the nation that gave the world the English language, and who still misguidedly believe they are responsible for its safekeeping. On the face of it, the English are ordered, respectful and regular. After one drink, a samaritan cup of tea or ten minutes in a crowded train compartment, those unfamiliar with the country and its people discover that the English are, in fact, confused, rebellious and driven by animal spirits. No wonder their language is a mess.

One particular linguistic trait I have noticed more of over the last twelve months of on-and-off lockdown shows how the English use of language evades any notion of sense and order. It’s the word ‘they’. And its use in everyday conversation says much about the English psyche. The following phrases are offered by way of examples:

“They are talking about another lockdown.”

“They are going to close the schools again.”

“They say the vaccine is useless without the second dose.”

“What do they know?”

“Who cares what they say?”

A first-year student of the English language may be confused as to who ‘they’ refers to in the above examples. But any Englishman or woman will know precisely who each sentence refers to.

‘They’ is the loose collective of action and indecision, authority and inexpertise, disaster and incompetence, that represents the ‘other.’ And I don’t mean the open-shirted, Gauloises-tainted, post-structural concept of ‘other’ that may be acceptable in a cafe around the corner from the Sorbonne. I mean literally, the others. You know, the others. The establishment. Our betters. Those bastards.

The English use ‘they’ as a useful receptacle for their anger and frustration. The word is a seemingly bottomless bucket able to hold gallons of muddy blame. ‘They’ is the linguistic equivalent of the mixing bowl that doubles as bedside reassurance for the nauseous. It’s a spittoon for the phlegmy many who have given up on a mercenary and political class, self-serving civil servants, corporate egotists and LinkedIn middle management pimps. As I said, Bastards.

I used to applaud the use of ‘they’ in common parlance as I mistakenly thought of it as a two-fingered salute to authority. I saw it as the logical byproduct of keeping eccentric individuals trapped on a windswept island, and the inevitable development of a sense of humour to keep the damp at bay.

Now, after years of plain stupid — and plainly cruel — austerity; the imposition of the hardest of possible Brexits by politicians afraid of being straight with people; and the genuinely world-beating ineptitude of a Government’s handling of a pandemic, I’m not so sure.

I’m now minded to think that using the word ‘they’ to describe these morons avoids having to name them, and so means they avoid culpability. It doesn’t ascribe blame, so much as let slippery people off the hook. It anonymises them in the same way that an inmate refers to the ‘screws’, and reflects the fact that an Englishman’s home is not a castle, but a prison cell. It proves the English are powerless captives of a system so fundamentally buggered that ineptitude, corruption and fuckwittery is not only expected, but is actually accepted as being par for the course.

Faced with their impotence, the English will roll their eyes, take another sip and ask “What are you going to do?’ – while the deaths mount, the trade dries up and the streets continue to empty.

What indeed?