All right?

I love words, their origin, meaning, changing meaning and pronunciation. Growing older is a curious experience in the sense that, at least in my case, it has not yet involved growing up. It has been somewhat of a shock, therefore, to note how many younger people have started speaking to me very loudly. Worse is the question 'All right?' or I thought it was. Let me explain. It seems "Health professionals," are trained in a rather odd way to deal with older people - that's anyone over 60 in case you wondered. Apparently with advancing years comes failing mental faculties and the need to treat people as if they are toddlers. An example. I get an annual "Old folks" check up. The first time (and this happens every time subsequently too) there is a checklist of questions. The doctor reads from the screen, you answer and are not allowed to say a word or ask a question until the whole form has been ticked. The first time I was asked, 'Have you fallen recently and how is your memory?' I could not resist replying, 'I can't remember,' big mistake - huge in fact. The poor man feverishly typed the answer and up popped supplementary questions. 'It's a joke,' I protested. When it comes to dealing with oldies humour is in short supply, indeed doc was quite cross and I was astonished. I thought of pointing out that posing two questions as one rather invites humour, but thought better of it.

So, "All Right?" in southern England pronounced "Or-ryte" I thought was another bit of PC oldie talk. I'm wrong, because increasingly it's used as a greeting. Walk into a pub and more often than not the landlady will not say, "Hello", but "Or-ryte." Formally people still use the standard "How do you do." But informally hello is losing out. It's fascinating to witness a change in language. Of course this is a process that's happened throughout history and we can see that from verb forms. Old English had two, strong and weak. The past tense of strong verbs was indicated by a change in the vowel. We still have some, fling/flung - sing/sung. The weak ones used the suffix "ed" move/moved dive/dived. The latter I find fascinating because in the southern USA dive/dove is normal and goes back to the old English verb form, despite it being more recent than dived.

I can't finish these musings without a note on pronunciation. When I was a child, adults were semi hysterical about what were called dropped aitches. Instead of Harrow some would say Arra, so one finished up with Arry erdid is sheep threw Arra, instead of Harry herded his sheep through Harrow. Obviously this could be confusing. Now, increasing, people pronounce Aitch as Haych with a strong huh emphasis. There is theory that this arose because a refugee from Arra thought is sounded posh. It's like the Spanish lisp that apparently came into Castilian because a King had a speech impediment that others copied.

I can't leave this without touching on the genius of whomever it was in Soviet Russia who decided that those learning to speak English must pronounce H as G. This resulted in the wonders of a play called Gamlet and an airline called Luftgansa. I know this because I worked on a phone system in Central Asia. We wanted a catchy name and called it "Yellow Phone". Then we wanted a slogan. A Happy Home has a Yellowphone sounded great until it got turned into. A Gappy Gome gas a Yellowphone.

Maybe time to abolish H? It causes all sorts of trouble.