The joys of non-standard English

A look at Listen Mr Oxford Don, by John Agard

Every so often some so-called educator, or a politician who thinks they know something about education, has a psychological meltdown about people using non-standard English. Whether it’s youngsters using slang, or (shudder) text-speak in their writing or a different branch of the language altogether, they rail against the corruption of our glorious language, the Queen’s English.

Honestly, listening to these people you could be forgiven for wondering why on earth we no longer speak like Chaucer or Shakespeare. I mean, didn’t those people believe they were speaking the King’s or Queen’s English too?

One of the debates that occurs every so often in the UK is whether or not “Creole” languages are real languages, dialects, or something else. Whatever the correct answer is, or even if there is a correct answer, makes no difference. Some people think the focus should be on learning and speaking the Queen’s English, in order to be able to get a job, not be looked down upon and to generally fit in with polite English society.

Fair enough, but surely there is also room and scope for celebrating other variants, all of which emanate from a culture and background vastly different from our own?

A wonderful and humorous riposte to those killjoys is Listen Mr Oxford Don, by John Agard. Agard was born in British Guyana, and now lives in the UK. His poetry has been featured in school poetry programmes, and he has won awards.

You can read the text of the poem here. What I love about it is the following:

The length of the stanzas, and the length of the lines within the stanzas, and the rhyme scheme, vary enormously. This to me gives the poem its vibrancy and joyfulness.

For example, in the first stanza the rhyme scheme is ababb:

Me not no Oxford don
me a simple immigrant
from Clapham Common
I didn’t graduate
I immigrate

But in the sixth stanza it’s abbcdeef — although the ‘c’, “time” does have its counterpart (“rhyme”) in the next line, but not at the end. There is probably a technical word for this but I haven’t been able to discover what it is:

Dem accuse me of assault
on de Oxford dictionary/
imagine a concise peaceful man like me/
dem want me serve time
for inciting rhyme to riot
but I tekking it quiet
down here in Clapham Common

There are also a few sly (or wry?) references:

The Oxford Don is the epitome of intellectual snobbery, and died-in-the-wool tradition. This is clearly unfair to many Oxford graduates and teachers, but it does denote a certain type of person.

I like the allusion to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and the gentle poke at the injunction to never split infinitives. Incidentally, that rule comes from Latin grammar and makes absolutely no sense in the context of English. It was made up by pedants who had probably run out of things to be pedantic about.

But so much for introductions and persiflage. Here is the poet himself reciting it: