Now that Armen Avanessian brought it up, it might be time to talk about Mid-Atlantic. It was Anne Philippi who said the other day in the skype chat that we had between Los Angeles, Zurich, Delhi, Vienna and Berlin that she had heard people talk about this new form of English, crushed, broken, used, abused, cherished. This is us, we said. We use and abuse English like a language should be used and abused, not always, but why not by us at this moment in time? The world changes, languages change, and it is strange that the people who might critize our broken English are the people who live that change the most. But maybe that*s just the way it is. I really do think that it is good to strip language from this barrier of ownership, to set it free to be the lingua franca it is, to let people take its share, to move the language this way and that way across the Atlantic and further West and East as we please. Language is a tool, after all, a means, not an end – and the bastardisation of the language that we might further here is just a reaction to the way the words, the brains, the mores expand and contract, have a different meaning at different times without the necessary relativist draw-back, should offer the openess to redefine who you are, where you come from, who you want to be and where you want to go. Or, more easily said: Everybody understands when we meet Mid-Atlantic. (Obviously this story is only half-true, as Mid-Atlantic English originally refers to “a cultivated or acquired version of the English language once found in certain aristocratic elements of American society”, a blend of American and British, as Wikipedia, the home of mid-Atlanticism, points out. There is also a list of famous mid-Atlanticians: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Maria Callas. Quite a list.) So is Broken English a song of freedom? Listen for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt-RDA8KhWQ