bespoke words

One of the many little things I've noticed since moving to the Island is that the natives speak a strange kind of language. In print, most looks like English. Spoken, it's a different story. Pronunciation can be incredibly mangled, and I have oftentimes a hard time understanding what is going on.

It's worst on the phone. When I called British Telecom to get a landline, the bloke on the other end repeatedly asked me if I wanted a bisic lane. What kind of lane? I don't need a lane. It took me a while to figure out that he was offering the basic line, which I took.

Pronunciation is only part of the problem. You bounce the sounds around in your head a little, and things will eventually fall into place and become comprehensible. Words are a different story. Most probably know about the whimsies dear to English tongues like lorry, carriage, trolley, aluminium. But it goes deeper.

Take 'bespoke'. What could it mean? Knowing that it is the past participle of bespeak doesn't really help. In fact, nothing really helps besides knowing that the words means custom-made, used in particular with reference to clothes. Why you can't just say custom-made is beyond me, and don't go to your tailer asking him to bespeak a new pair of pants for you. I doubt that would work.

Another word is 'to busk', which describes an activity that is even more common around here than the word. It means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, 'to play music or perform entertainment in a public place, usually while soliciting money'. Buskers are in the tube, at Southbank and all over Covent Garden. Often, they're lame, but sometimes deserving of my pound.

Something completely different is rhyming slang, a way of speaking that developed in Cockney in East London. Here, words are substituted with mates that rhyme. If you want to get fancy, you substitute with a phrase and drop the bit that actually rhymes. Sounds cryptic? It is. An easy example would be to call the football score 2:2 a 'Desmond', after the South African arch-bishop Desmond Tutu. 'Hello me old china' is even less obvious. China is short for china plate and rhymes with mate. 'Hello my mate.' There you go.

Living in West London, I haven't consciously encountered rhyming slang yet. What I encounter every day in the streets are people not speaking English at all. I hear Polish, Arabic, Hindi, and whatever it is Sikh speak. I've come to London to be back in a place where I understand people and can easily participate in conversations, but then I walk around the Bush and feel more foreign than in France. Fortunately enough, this changes as quickly as I open my mouth, because everyone understands me and I understand them – with a little effort. And I get to enjoy the incredible diversity.