Bubbly Hinc

When my brother and I were respectively about eleven and twelve years old, we sometimes used to stay with an aunt and uncle in Herefordshire. Their own two boys were a few years younger than us, and had some interesting words in their vocabulary that amused us (more sophisticated) young men a lot.

Our favourites were (the spelling is of course mine) 'bubbly' and 'hink'. Both terms cropped up quite a lot in ordinary conversation, and very occasionally were used together as a phrase 'bubbly hink'.

"Are we going out anywhere this afternoon ?" we might enquire. And they would reply "We're all going to see friends at Marlwood, bubbly, hink."

Whether my brother and I were able to spell it, at least we knew that bubbly meant 'probably', and realised that hink must mean 'I think'. The terms entered our own private vocabulary, rather as one consciously uses foreign words, and were never forgotten.

But don't we all, even correct spellers, mangle words when we speak them ? Do you never say 'probbly', or 'praps' ? Do you always pronounce 'actually' as a four-syllable word, and never shorten it to 'atcherly' . Bubbly you do, hink.

Which leads me to comment on the late Bernard Shaw's pottiest notion that it might be possible to modify English spelling so that it was entirely phonetic. You can see what he meant: why not write 'ment' instead of 'meant ' ? Or rite instead of write or right ? Or thort instead of thought ? But our English language, even now after eighty years of radio and sixty of television (theez figgers are not ment to be prisice) we don't all pronounce words the same. In East Anglia where I live, 'boat' is often pronounced 'boot'. My wife, brought up in Lancashire, says glass (to ryme, or rime, with lass) rather than glarce. Our American cousins say dants for dance. Scots say 'worrld' where southerners say 'werld'. Few of us now pronounce the 'h' in 'where' or 'when', but say 'wear' and 'wen'. Did Shaw imagine that the public could be educated to change their pronunciation to match his new spelling ?

Shaw should have known (or shud uv noan) that pronunciations have been constantly evolving since the first (Anglo-Saxon) English was spoken. Who, at any stage in its evolution, had the authority to insist that any particular version of any particular word was right, and others wrong ?

It took some centuries of print before any notion of 'correct spelling' was generally adopted, and that only because it is easier to read familiar sequences of letters than to have the extra trouble of interpreting all sorts of variations. Correct spelling is only a convention that helps us to read*. To seek a similar universal convention for pronunciation would be asking too much - it just wouldn't happen. And to seek to train everyone to write words as he or she says them would cause more problems than it would solve.

It is a pity, perhaps (praps), that American and English spellings have been allowed to diverge. Flavors and flavours are both acceptable spellings, and it would bubbly be no bad thing if all English-speakers would agree to a single convention in the matter. It should not, hink, be a matter of national pride.

*Atcherly, it also helps us pedants to work out what the origins of most of our words are; but we must admit that we are only a very tiny minority, and most folks couldn't care less. Of course, we would say they don't know what fun they are missing.

Bubbly hink