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he’d say in the midst of an interesting story the scholar was trying to share, “but this expression you just used is outdated.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.
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