“You are an Englishman, and have subsequently drawn the greatest prize in the lottery of life,” said Cecil Rhodes who wasn’t known for his attachment to equity and diversity. (He probably meant ‘therefore’, not ‘subsequently’, but then Rhodes was a man of action, not words.)
Since such attachment has since become de rigueur for anyone daring to open his mouth in public, that simple statement of patriotism would now be seen as politically controversial, possibly even actionable.
The word ‘Englishman’ especially is objectionable on many counts, and, unless you’ve spent the past few years in a different galaxy, you’ll know why. ‘Man’ alone violates a political taboo with flagrant disregard for progressive sensibilities. As for the implied claim to English superiority – well, choose your own term from ‘racist’, ‘jingoist’, ‘colonialist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘little Englander’ and all the others that spring to mind.
Such is the way of the world: formerly innocuous words have become political statements, each capable of inciting febrile passions. To be able to act in that capacity, words often have to part ways with their dictionary definitions.
Such debauchment is characteristic of modern politics in general, and words aren’t the only victims. Reason and morality are the other targets pinned to the wall for politics to snipe at, and it hits the bullseye every time.
Relativism reigns in morality, scholarship and even linguistics. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the late philosopher of language, would have approved.
He once objected to the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ as a semantic solecism: “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ – though not for all – this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
It has been a long time since I read his books, so I don’t remember how he qualified that statement. And qualifications are needed because different people may use the same word differently. Educated people tend to stay close to dictionary definitions, whereas someone like Trump may use ‘lay’ to mean ‘lie’ and ‘deal’ to mean ‘capitulation’.
Athenian rhetoricians were aware of the ambivalence of language, which is why before every debate they insisted on making sure both parties agreed on the terms. That kind of rigour is a thing of the past, and modern people insist that words mean whatever they want them to mean.
For example, ‘English’ rivals ‘man’ for its ambiguity and negative connotations in modern usage. Hence the provocative question “Is Rishi Sunak really English?” that Fraser Nelson asked in the title to his article.
When queried on the subject by the Russo-British comedian Konstantin Kisin, Nelson replied that yes, of course. Sunak was born and bred here, which makes him as English as, well, Cecil Rhodes. To that Kisin replied that his son was born in England too, but he’d never become English. So much for paternal pride — the little boy has every reason to feel dejected.
I couldn’t claim dispassionate objectivity there, for the issue concerns me personally. However, Wittgenstein would instantly spot that the disagreement isn’t substantive but only semantic.
Adjectives describing people by geographic locations can have at least two meanings: ethnic and civic. In some countries, each of those commands its own word. In some others, one word covers both.
The word ‘American’, for example, is predominantly political and vestigially cultural. It implies citizenship of, and hence allegiance to, the USA, and also loyalty to the American idea, although this last demand is on the wane. That’s why the House Committee investigating communist infiltration in the 1950s dealt with un-American rather than anti-American activities.
The word’s ethnic meaning is muted, which is why Americans often identify themselves by adding the land of their ancestry to their self-identification: Irish-American, Russian-American, Italian-American and so on.
Since the US is a country of immigrants, there used to be – still are, but let’s not talk about it too loudly – a premium put on being American born and bred. In the past, that used to be called ‘100 per cent American’, which made the concept arithmetically quantifiable.
The word ‘French’ is more voluminous, with the cultural and linguistic aspects stronger than in most such appellations. In addition to designating citizenship and ethnicity, ‘French’ also means a native Francophone living in France, to some extent even regardless of his citizenship and ethnicity.
The French are more likely to describe, say, a Senegalese or Algerian as French than the English are to refer to a Ghanaian or Nigerian as English. This doesn’t mean the French are any less racist than the English, only that they attach a greater importance to culture.
The Russian language has two words keeping the ethnic and political aspects apart: Russkiy and Rossiyanin. Both are translated into English as ‘Russian’, which loses a valid distinction. Russkiy is ethnically Russian; Rossiyanin is any citizen of the Russian Federation, who may be Kazakh, Uzbek or even Jewish.
This takes me back to the misunderstanding that arose between Messrs Nelson and Kisin. They ignored the recommendation of ancient Athenian rhetoricians and failed to agree on the terms. The two parties may use the words rightly or wrongly, but they’ll still understand each other provided they both use the words the same way.
For our language also keeps ethnicity apart from politics by offering words like ‘English’ (‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Irish’) to identify ethnicity and the word ‘British’ to denote citizenship. Any holder of the British passport is thus British; some Britons, such as Penelope, are also English, and some others, such as Kisin, Sunak and, well, me, aren’t.
If we accept this classification, we’ll agree that becoming British is possible but becoming English isn’t. But the idea of ‘born and bred’ doesn’t quite wash as the definition of the latter.
When the British Empire built by people like Cecil Rhodes was still going strong, many Englishmen were born and bred thousands of miles away from England – and yet were every bit as English as lifelong denizens of Sussex or Norfolk, perhaps even more so. Conversely, many people born and bred in England today would swear at you, or possibly even resort to physical violence, if you called them English.
The deeper I go into this linguistic labyrinth, the more hopelessly lost I get. For ‘English’ and ‘British’ don’t just have objective meanings of, respectively, ethnicity and political allegiance. The subjective aspect of culture and self-identification refuses to be ignored, and that’s where the labyrinth puts the Hampton Court Maze to shame.
The late Tory politician Norman Tebbit (who could have made a much better PM than any we’ve had since) offered the cricket test of Britishness: which side the person rooted for when England played a test match against India, Pakistan or the West Indies.
I pass with flying colours: in any sporting contest involving England and Russia (or the US, whose expired passport is gathering dust somewhere in my drawer), I support England with enthusiasm. But then I also did so living in Russia, when my claim to Britishness was rather more tenuous.
These days, one is supposed to identify by one’s personal pronouns, and in this case that may be as good a solution as any. The personal pronoun of salient importance here is ‘we’. How a person defines his ‘we’ determines his identity.
Speaking for myself, I could never force myself to say ‘we’ when spending the first 25 years of my life in Russia and the next 15 in the US. I did try to do so in America, but the word felt contrived and awkward.
In Britain, the word naturally rolls off my tongue, which organ these days has to bend itself into all sorts of painful shapes when I speak any language other than English. Britain is my ‘we’, English is my first (though not native) language, my wife is English, I write exclusively and read mostly in English.
Add to this my British passport, always kept up to date, and I’m definitely British. But I lack the delusions of grandeur to claim I’ve drawn the winning ticket in the lottery of life. I’ll have to leave ‘English’ for people of a more fortunate nativity.
P.S. None of this prevents me from feeling pride in the achievements of my native land. It has just been announced that Russia tops the list of industrialised nations with the greatest part of the population having no access to lavatories. A country by any other name would smell as sweet.