Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) SDA Late Nite Radio.
In The Adventure of English, Melvin Bragg’s fascinating and highly-readable book about the origins of our language, the author describes how an English speaker who hears someone speaking in Frisian, our nearest ancestral language, may get an odd, persistent feeling that he is this close to understanding what’s being said. Many of the words are almost identical (“goose” is goes, “butter” is buter, “sleep” is sliepe, “sea” is see, “cheese” is tsiis, and so on) but are simply pronounced a bit differently, and in that sense, he notes, Frisian is not so very different from England’s regional Geordie dialect, for example, and only slightly less comprehensible.
Stanley Unwin, tonight’s featured performer, was a British comedic actor with a peculiar and artful talent for speaking in a way that left listeners similarly hovering on the edge of comprehension. His unusual word constructions all sounded vaguely familiar, and he was so reassuringly English in his mannerisms and delivery that listeners who – inevitably, and by design, of course – could never quite parse the always convincing-sounding point he was making always felt that the shortfall must be their own fault, and that they would surely understand him if only they listened a bit more closely. Unwin traced the origins of his “strange but strangely comprehensible lexicon” to the day when his mother, who had tripped on the way home from work, told him that she’d “‘falolloped’ in front of a tram and grazed her ‘kneeclappers.'” His own use of language would later show that same sort of Joycean creativity: Elvis “wasp-waist and swivel-hippy” Presley, for example, was “tilty hibbers’n stick out the torso’n wobble both knee-clappers’n singit…”
Tonight’s selection, from the British film Carry On Regardless, is an excerpt of a scene in which Unwin’s baffling argot results in him being mistaken for a job applicant when he is in fact the business’ landlord trying to tell the owners that he has found another tenant. Watch the hilarious facial expressions of Miss Cooling at 2:37, as she hovers in a state of mild, diligence-induced torment: she doesn’t have the first clue as to what Unwin is saying, but his tone and cadence and and intonation are so eloquent-sounding as to leave her troubled by the possibility that he is speaking quite comprehensibly, and that she’s just not picking up on it – a self-doubt surely validated by Kenneth Williams’ character’s casual ability to precisely restate Unwin’s – apparently clear – position.
Here it is then, for your amusement: Stanley Unwin baffles the Carry On Team.
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