Old Europe versus the Power of 'W'

In what is thus far a vain effort to comprehend the international situation I have recently spent several afternoons in WWS bowls listening to various experts. I've heard of a variety of opinion, but none of the visiting pundits have approached the heart of the matter — linguistic history.

The authors of the immortal "1066 and All That" characterize the adversaries in the English Civil War in the following terms. The Cavaliers were "wrong but wromantic," the Roundheads "right but repulsive." A good deal of current Franco-Teutonic posturing about American policy toward Iraq strikes me as of the Roundhead variety, sensible in substance, outrageously hypocritical and self-righteous in expression.

Dominique de Villepin, the smarmy French foreign minister, opines that if America's "coalition of the willing" moves against Saddam Hussein without the further backing of the do-nothing Security Council it will set civilization back by eighty years. That would take us to 1923 and the interim brief period between the two wars in which Americans died in the thousands fighting Germans in order to rescue Frenchmen from their myopia, malfeasance, and military incompetence.

M. de Villepin's incapacity to comprehend a policy that is "wrong but wromantix" — vintage W, that is — begins with his philological incapacity, almost universally shared by his compatriots, to cope with W itself (as opposed himself).

Who can blame them? If your national prestige had been in gradual decline for two centuries following an event called Waterloo, you might have a grudge against W as well.

Yet W is an important index of the manifest linguistic, economic, and political superiority of contemporary Anglo-Saxonia as compared with contemporary Francophonia. Why do you think the French language is in a worldwide decline while English is burgeoning? Why does per capita industrial productivity in South Carolina outstrip that in the dpartement of Seine-et-Loire? We enjoy rich rewards for having the patience to deal with the annoyance of a letter that takes three syllables to misrepresent twin V's as twin U's. Modern French has tried to banish the letter altogether, allowing only minimal easements. Since having a word for "toilet" seems to be beneath the dignity of the French language, one still commonly sees "w.c.", pronounced vay-ay, an ossification of the Victorian English euphemism "water closet"! A tiny number of Saxon loanwords on more dignified subjects, such as le wagon-lit and le weekend are either obsolete or under active persecution by the French language police.

But English, which has generously welcomed literally thousands of French words, had the good sense to borrow most of them long ago from the superpower Normans. Unlike their effete neighbors in the le de France, the Normans positively loved the W—without which, after all, there could be no power, let alone superpower. I suspect neither M. de Villepin nor Mr. Powell is aware that the "special relationship" of the letters G and W is a simple historical fact of the dialectical history of French and English alike. In fact they were often alternatives. Knowing this helps you see the kinship, otherwise unobvious, between English war and French guerre or in grasping the essential identity of the words warden and guardian—among many other examples I could adduce.

Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that the movers and shakers of this world should not despise the practical power of a little philological book-learning. I have to admit to a certain degree of absentmindedness. I am likely to leave my reading glasses almost anywhere and my wristwatch in gym lockers or by the side of the pool. This means I have to buy new reading glasses very frequently and new watches more often than I should. I buy the cheapest available. For glasses that's about three bucks a pair at Englishtown Market, for watches fifteen or twenty bucks.

Some time ago I bought a new Timex at a local drugstore. I didn't expect it to run forever, but I thought it ought to do better than the approximately fifteen-minutes that it did work. Fortunately, I had kept the box it came in, along with its little pieces of paper; and I took it right back to the clerk from whom I had bought it. I explained my unhappiness with his defective product. "Here is the printed guarantee", I said. He sniffed at my piece of paper. "Oh, I don't know, sir," he said officiously. "That is not a guarantee. It is a limited warranty". I was able to tell him: "Look, bub, I am the Louis W. Fairchild, '24, Professor of English at Princeton University; and I can tell you that there is not a dime's worth of difference between a guarantee and a warranty, the later being the Anglo-Norman version of the former. So give me a new watch!" He gave me a new watch. It's running still.

John V. Fleming really is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English.