Denis Homepage
Trinidad Express
Going to tong with English
January 13, 2002
By Denis Solomon
TODAY I can write about something more interesting than politics: language. For the chance, I thank my colleagues Keith Smith and BC Pires.
This is rare, for Keith and BC, unlike most T&T journalists, normally use English with precision and to great effect. But I ketch dem dis time.
BC’s solecism recalls an earlier column of mine about metaphor.
In his retrospective forecast for the year 2001, BC predicts that President Robinson “will depart this mortal coil”.
This is high-class stuff–Shakespeare, no less. But the trouble is, BC, that the lines from Hamlet are:
But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause…
You can metaphorically shuffle off a mortal coil, but you can’t depart one. Why? Because the coil in question means the turmoil of life, and to shuffle it off means to rid oneself of it, the way one would shrug oneself out of a garment. Moral? Quote Shakespeare, but don’t firetruck with him.
At the start of Keith’s picaresque account of how he and a friend stormed a fete by posing as ice deliverymen, I was startled by the description of a block of ice “on which a thong…lay invitingly straddled”. Aroused by the image of a flimsy item of women’s underwear atop a block of ice, I was preparing for an exploration of sexual perversion rivalling the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade, when I realised with dismay that the item in question must have been not a thong, but a “tong”, or rather a pair of tongs, ice-tongs to be exact.
In this one word we have a compendium of interferences between Creole and English. In an article some years ago on an attempt by the Leos Club to run a spelling bee, I wrote “A child asked to give a spelling for “rong” would have to decide fairly rapidly among “round”, “rung” and “wrong”: for “tong”, among “town”, “tongue”, “tong” and “thong”. In another piece I referred to “the conflation of word-groups by the pronunciation of “town”, “tongue” and “thong” as “tong”.
These examples show the Creole lack of a “th” sound, and the “ung” or “ong” pronunciation of words with an “ou” or “ow” spelling, like “town”. Creole lacks the grammatical category of number: plurality is not indicated by a suffix, and that leaves the Trini free to use a final S everywhere except where it is needed (a Cokes, a rounds, a ten-dollars roti, back in times, in open waters…I have even heard a radio operator on the marine band say “Rogers”). There is also the linguistic insecurity that often gives birth to hilarious hypercorrections.
So the item temptingly displayed on Keith’s block of ice was not a tong (a Chinese criminal fraternity) or a thong, but a pair of tongs. The pronunciation was doubtless “tong”, the “th” being supplied, in this case wrongly, by Keith’s knowledge of Trini pronunciation of English words.
But the story doesn’t end there. Why a “tong” and not “a pair of tongs”? Follow closely.
In English, items that occur in quantity may be referred to by singular “mass” nouns, such as “rice”, “water”. In such cases units of the material are indicated (a) by arbitrary lexical means (a drop of water) (b) if they are naturally divisible, by lexical items called counters (a grain of rice,) or else (c) by the use of the indefinite article to designate the unit (hair / a hair). There are also (d) items designated by singular “count” nouns, which nevertheless customarily occur in pairs (shoes) or quantities (matches).
In Creolised English, class (b) nouns are put into class (c) (“a bread”); class (c) nouns fall into class (b) (“a grain of hair”); class (d) nouns are treated as class (b) (“a side of shoe”; “a grain of match”). And some nouns whose referents, in English, are not even considered as appearing in quantities, are so considered in Trinidadian (“a piece of tool”).
Not only does the final -S sound of words like “blouse” and “licence” get interpreted as a plural suffix (one blou, two blouse; one licen, two licence), but the opposite also happens–the -S of plural nouns gets interpreted as part of a singular form, and we get “a pants”. And Standard English class (d) nouns designating single items are “singularised” by the removal of the S (“a tong” for “a pair of tongs”).
Hypercorrection means “correcting” items that need no correction, under the influence of linguistic insecurity– the speaker’s knowledge of the kind of errors he is likely to make. Keith’s notional correction of “tong(s) to “thong” is nothing to some hypercorrections I have heard. For example, “influck” as the supposed singular of “influx”. Or “unsound heroes” for “unsung heroes”.
Finally, a non-linguistic reaction to Keith’s story. Keith and his friend each held one handle of the tongs. They were lucky. You carry a block of ice by holding one handle, not both. Otherwise you open the tongs and the ice drops on your foot (or feet).
Copyright © Denis Solomon