PNR 281, January-February 2025
This editorial comes to you from Oaxaca, where I spent six weeks over Christmas and New Year among Mexican friends and relations. I spoke almost exclusively Spanish, at public occasions, in conversation, and found my English deprivation growing daily more acute. My ability to remember words (in conversations with myself, my only Anglophone companion) weakened. Wanting to use it in an email, I spent half an hour recovering the word ‘superflux’ from the tucks and folds of memory. My emails themselves became overlong, and my style reverted to that of the young Thomas Babington Macaulay. As a boy I loved Macaulay’s elaborated sentences, the affectation yet vigour of his syntax, and his abundant vocabulary which wore its etymologies on its sleeve. The History of England was my Whiggish bible, and it took many years to recover from it. In the end Philip French, who produced some of my radio work, told me that my style was ‘unspeakable’ in at least one sense, perhaps two, at which point I began to write a less unnatural, a more sayable English.
In Oaxaca I also found that my Spanish, the first language in which I was fluent, has started to become uncertain. My vocabulary has lost so many words through disuse that every complex sentence becomes a series of inventive periphrases.