And then I saw the light

In the summer of 1976 I put a classified ad in The Times offering my services as a TEFL teacher. It yielded just one reply, from a language school on Whitflied Street near Tottenham Court Road. I went for a job interview and was hired for ten weeks.

On starting the job, I quickly learned that MM, the owner of the school, was a member of Opus Dei. All the students were somehow connected with the Roman Catholic church - a mixture of priests, nuns, bishops, university lecturers and young people from devout families. The students were lovely. The owner ...

One day, while having our mid-morning tea and biscuits, he expounded the difference between truth and heresy. The Catholic Church was the only true christianity, and Castilian was the only true Spanish. All the others were perversions and abominations. Hmmm.

Perhaps because of this, or perhaps despite it, for many years I tended to be a language Nazi: bristling at incorrect usage and correcting people willy-nilly - even family members!

Then about 10-15 years ago something in me shifted. It might have been under the influence of John McWhorter and/or Douglas Hofstadter and/or Stephen Pinker. It might have been McWhorter's work on language change, Hofstadter's extensive writing on meaning and context, or Pinker's evolutionary linguistics perspective. It might have been an effect of meditation. In any event, I became interested in the many different ways that people use language, rather than intolerant of them.

This doesn't mean that I have become a model of tolerance. I am still perfectly capable of being irked by plenty of things that people (including myself) say, such as 'just saying', 'incredibly', 'it's, like'. Not to mention f*** and its variants.

I don't know whether MM has departed this life and found out whether his religious conviction was true. I do know that he would be appalled by the world of 2025.