A scholar who is not a native speaker of English was telling a story to me and to another colleague. Her English is phenomenal with maybe a tiny trace of an accent. As a non-native speaker, though, she sometimes uses expressions that sound a little quaint. This makes her speech very distinctive and enjoyable.
The colleague, however, was not appreciative of this scholar’s slightly foreign style of speaking English. He kept interrupting her with mini-lectures.
“I can see you don’t know this,” he’d say in the midst of an interesting story the scholar was trying to share, “but this expression you just used is outdated. If you’d used it in the thirties, it would make sense. Nowadays, however, the correct usage would be. . .”
The scholar is a very polite person and took these remarks in her stride.
I, however, am not. I see people who keep interrupting you to correct your language as bullies. As a language teacher, I never interrupt even my own students when they speak.
So I have invented the following formula I use to shut up language bullies.
“Oh,” I say, “I totally understand that you don’t want to hear me speak your language since I do it so poorly. So from now on, let’s speak mine instead.”
And I switch into Russian. This cures language bullies from their unhealthy linguistic hubris very fast.
Clarissa's Blog 
There are some pan-Africanists who try to put me in my place by speaking in Shona. I respond to them in French.
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That’s ridiculous! I wonder if this colleague of yours would correct someone for using an “outdated” expression if a native English speaker was saying it.
One of my favorite expressions (for almost every situation) is to exclaim loudly “Man Alive!” Which was much more in place in the 1970’s.
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I have never even heard this expressions. 🙂
I think I should start using it. 🙂
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I like a lot of outdated expressions from the 1920s.
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I say “the den of iniquity” and “wild horses wouldn’t drag me away from here.” I also use many cure British expressions. It’s done facetiously but some people keep pointing out to me, “That’s a British expression. Here, we don’t use it.” And that’s very boring.
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They’re the bees knees.
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@JFA
Stupid wordpress.
I also like “chin music” for hitting a guy in the face, “Chicago typewriter” is a good one. “Cat’s meow” and “splifficated” need to come back in a big way. “Hooch”, too. I think “copacetic” started back then and I don’t know if the kids are saying it but it got fly again when I was an undergrad. Best one, though: “Applesauce!”
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Ah, for the days when all the bimbos jawed the bull like a torpedo dick in a juice joint.
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There are all levels to cultural and linguistic bigotry. My language always lapses into the realm of the politically correct — mostly, I suspect, because people have taken it upon themselves to censor me quite intensively and extensively over the years concerning what they consider to be my “colonial” lapses. Consequently, I always revert to politically incorrect language when I am in private or at ease with my surroundings.
A typical interaction with Mike will go as follows:
Me: “Given that you are an ape, what hope is there for you? You’ll have to sleep in the shed with the spiders. I suspect they will be kind enough to be your friends.”
Mike: “You don’t know anything yet sadza [staple food of Zimbabwe] girl!. You are the one who needs to live with spiders.”
Me: [Adopting an elitist tone}: “Yes, but I’m only thinking of your best interests. How are you going to get along in life? What will give you the best quality of life?”
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Tell him to go read Aleksander Hemon. Or, if you are feeling really devious, say something like “no, my students use that expression all the time, don’t you know it’s made a comeback?” 🙂
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That’s a good one. 🙂 Make the bully feel outdated, eh? I can totally get behind that strategy. 🙂
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Heh, “Language bully” is a term I’ve used before to describe people who say that people who speak in Hawaiian Pidgin are stupid or ill-bred. It’s so handy!
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“I, however, am not. I see people who keep interrupting you to correct your language as bullies. ”
I completely agree. I hate it when people take it upon themselves to “educate” me in this regard. I can generally pick up on expressions when they are used the way I wouldn’t use them, so I eventually self-correct. The best way to educate me would be to use the correct expression in your speech and I will notice. Rubbing a mistake in is very insulting, especially from someone who only speaks one language. Language bullies seem to get a misguides sense of superiority from this behavior.
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Because I chat with a lot of people on the internet, I occasionally find myself explaining some of the expressions I use. For instance ‘in the doghouse,’ which actually has nothing at all to do with a dog.
Most of them speak English, but some use different dialects and two aren’t native English speakers. If it seems like they can’t quite come up with a word, I just ask “do you mean ___?” And then the conversation goes on from there.
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It’s one thing when it’s done to promote understanding, like you do. It’s a completely different thing when it’s done maliciously just for the pleasure of interrupting a person.
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One of these days, you’ll find your conversation partner will continue the conversation, and it’ll seem like a scene out of Star Wars, where all the humans speak English and all the aliens speak something else – occasionally with subtitles.
I’ve always wanted to observe with a Spanish and English speaker so I could understand both conversations without having to think in Spanish and English simultaneously.
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Not sure they’re really bullying. If the person thinks you’re trying to use a modern expression and didn’t get it right, he just might be trying to be helpful.
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Interrupting a colleague time and again when she is trying to tell a story? That just isn’t normal.
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I agree that the example above is incredibly rude on the part of the native speaker, but I think it can be different when you’re much earlier in the language-learning process.
I live in Germany and have only been learning the language for just over a year – and had never spoken it outside classroom roleplays until I arrived here last October. I’m unable to take any language classes at the moment, so I’m mostly self-taught and have to rely on day-to-day interaction to learn. I find plurals, noun genders and irregular verbs particularly difficult, and it frustrates me no end when I’m in the middle of a sentence, stuck on an ending or an article, looking quizzically at the native speaker I’m talking to and they offer me no help. Sometimes I ask directly if I’m saying a word correctly and they say yes – then I later find out that it was wrong and they thought they were being polite by agreeing with me!
Of course, it’s not their duty to teach me (and I certainly don’t go around correcting all the English of my German friends, unless they ask me to – which some of them do), but it’s also not helpful when they leave me floundering, entangled in the middle of my own sentence.
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Before I studied abroad, I tried to practice Spanish with a Peruvian friend of mine in college. He would always interrupt me to correct me, and even though they were brief (just repeating the word I’d said with the correct conjugation) they made me forget what I was saying, and I wouldn’t be able to finish my thought. It’s put me off trying to practice languages at all until I know a lot more, which is bad because the best way to learn is to just start speaking it, right?
Anyway, my friend was just trying to be helpful, but I probably would have learned more if he hadn’t correctly me mid sentence. It’s just not a helpful teaching mechanism anyway.
Once I met people who were okay with just letting me chatter on unintelligibly in Spanish my language skills improved vastly 🙂
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“Once I met people who were okay with just letting me chatter on unintelligibly in Spanish my language skills improved vastly ”
– Exactly. This is the best way to let a person learn a language. The main factor that prevents successful learning is a fear of making a mistake. Once you get rid of that fear, you start learning much faster.
This is why I said I never interrupt my students when they speak.
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