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The wrong kind of unreadability…

Who owns English in a global market? asks Michael Skapinker in this week’s FT. The short answer is: no one, and everyone. Neither native speakers nor the many who have adopted English as a lingua franca (ELF), but both.

Thankfully, we have no real equivalent of the Académie Francaise stunting our language, just a few hundred million English speakers around the world keeping it very much alive and kicking and moving with the times and places.

Our wonderfully open and democratic English welcomes all comers – from the sublime to the ridiculous. Or should that be ridiculositous. In Democracy Has Bad Taste, the first of his Reith lectures, Grayson Perry recounts how an Art Forum editor said of a previous encumbent of her job that ‘English wasn’t her first language, so during her tenure as the editor, the magazine suffered from the wrong kind of unreadability’. Apparently her International Art English (IAE) wasn’t quite up to scratch. Her IAWhat? A particularly impenetrable form of art institution speak, designed to cultivate the seriousness of serious art and sounding like nothing so much as “inexpertly translated French” according to Monsieur Grayson. Witness this, again c/o of the great Mr Perry quoting a Venice Bienalle wall text: “Affectivity remans a central access in contemporary Uruguayan artistic production…”

Quintessentially Ridiculositous English (QRE). Don’t you just love it.