SCARCELY ENGLISH
An A–Z of Assaults on Our Language
Simon Heffer
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To the Burgharts of Greenstead
Introduction
In Middlemarch, young Ben Garth, a child whose serious and intelligent mother is educating him at home, rebels against having his English corrected. He protests to her: ‘I hate grammar. What’s the use of it?’
Mrs Garth is in no doubt. ‘To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood,’ George Eliot has her say ‘with severe precision’. Today, Mrs Garth might feel forced to qualify her statement somewhat. The purpose of speaking and writing correctly is not just in order to be understood – we have become used to understanding (while not condoning) all sorts of abominations in the misuse of the English language, of which this book contains a wide selection of examples – but so that those with whom one speaks, or who read what one has written, should treat the speaker or writer as an intelligent and thoughtful person as opposed to an ignorant one.
It is not unique to the British, or indeed to Anglophones, that we make assumptions about others the moment they open their mouths. If we hear people mangle their grammar or use the wrong word, the consequent assumption may well be that they are stupid, which is not a badge anyone especially wants to wear. Not that long ago, in the last part of the twentieth century, a remark such as that would have passed without comment, its being classed as what was, and perhaps by some still is, regarded as ‘a statement of the bleeding
obvious’. Now, when apparently everything to do with our social state and condition is regarded as potentially aggressively political, it is treated in some quarters with outrage. Possibly the gravest offence in our current society is to cause offence; and a reason why the guardians of our modern ethics find it so appalling that some of us should seek to improve the state of the English language is that it so often entails correcting another’s ignorance. Since we are all ignorant of something, and most of us are mature enough to admit that, this strikes me and others like me as being something of an extreme position.
The English language belongs to everyone who purports to speak it. Anyone critiquing it needs to bear in mind that the English, and indeed the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, are not the only people who speak it, even if they largely invented it (or perhaps it is more accurate to say, developed it). Ever since the Ancient Britons and various Picts, Gaels, Celts and other indigenous peoples were speaking in their own tongues, there have been impositions on that base by Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Normans. Then, there were wholesale thefts from German dialects, borrowings from French in various iterations, acquisitions from Latin, Greek, Persian, a number of Indian and African languages. More recently, English has been expanded by some of the cultures that took the language overseas in the first place – notably by the Americans, whose effect on changing the way the English language is spoken in the British Isles is increasingly prevalent and, for those of us who like the distinctions of British English, depressing and corrosive because it is almost always unnecessary.
At a time before the early nineteenth century, when literacy was far from universal and the absence of national newspapers, the railway or broadcasting prevented any degree of standardisation of English in Britain and Ireland, most
people spoke in regional dialects that had words and grammatical forms that were peculiar to each. Back in the Middle Ages, once the Norman ruling class had been marginalised and after the advent of the printing press, a small, educated class spoke and read a common language – the language of Chaucer – and it became the language used by those at Court, in what passed for the government, in the Church and in the ancient schools and universities. Slowly, literacy spread, and with it social mobility, engagement in politics and political discourse, and the wider deployment of a written language. The period leading up to and during the Civil Wars exemplified this movement, and Milton, in his prose works and political writings, was perhaps foremost among its practitioners. However, it would be centuries before something called ‘standard English’ would be properly developed. That would take widespread literacy (which did not come until the nineteenth century), easy access to and comprehension of the printed word whether in broadsheets, newspapers, pamphlets or books, and a standardisation of spelling and vocabulary that was only really settled by the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary. Work on this authoritative guide to the English language – in relation to which it immediately acquired an effectively biblical status – began in 1857. It was not, in its first edition, completed until 1928. A sign of how rapidly new words, or new meanings for old words, entered the vocabulary was shown by the fact that the first supplement to the dictionary came out only five years after its publication, in 1933; and further supplements appeared, then a second edition, and then a third, which is now so vast and so frequently in need of updating that it is wholly electronic and, so the Oxford University Press says, unlikely ever to be printed.
With language changing so quickly and comprehensively, one might ask why on earth one should bother sticking to
old rules, when new rules seem to impose themselves all the time? Perhaps a short answer is that grammar, which has evolved to a point where it helps make language comprehensible and free from ambiguity, now varies from the standard only when mangled by someone who has failed to learn its rules – rules that, in the interests of effective and reliable communication, remain important. As for the ‘rules’ concerning the meanings of individual words – the definitions in the standard dictionary – these may be altered for one of two reasons. The first is that the word comes to be applied to something other than has hitherto been the case: for example, a wallet was long a small leather or canvas case in which people, mostly men, kept their money and documents essential to them when on the move; now it is also a file on a smartphone in which one can keep electronic documents such as tickets and passes. Such an extension of the original meaning is entirely legitimate. The second is that someone simply does not know the correct meaning of a word – as in the phrase ‘he’s giving me a lot of aggravation’. That reason for change is not remotely legitimate.
Standard British English, of the sort I defend in this book, and defended in its two predecessors, Strictly English (2011) and Simply English (2014), seems now to have assumed the status of a dialect – or rather a lingua franca, which the dictionary (and, for the avoidance of doubt, when I refer to ‘the dictionary’ throughout this book, I mean the OED ) defines as ‘any language that is used by speakers of different languages as a common medium of communication; a common language’. It is the form of English that the proprietors and editors of most printed matter in the British Isles choose their publications to be written in – certainly its national newspapers – and which major broadcasting organisations use to communicate with their audiences. It is also readily understood by English speakers from other cultures where
their own version of English prevails, such as in America, or Australia, or India. This would seem to place it at the top of a hierarchy of versions of English (whether one accepts such a concept or not, reality dictates that such a thing exists), thereby underlining the importance of mastering its subtleties for those whose careers, or the smoothness of whose lives, may depend on fluency in it. That those editors make this choice is because it remains the standard educated dialect, and it respects the intelligence of an audience of readers and listeners. Some years ago I revised the style book for The Daily Telegraph in what turned out to be a mostly successful effort to provide the newspaper’s readers with journalism written in a form of English with which they were familiar. Any deviation from that standard was met with ferocious complaint, and rightly so. Whether the ‘experts’ who decry such a disciplined approach to our language like it or not, millions of people who speak and read British English have a definite view of how their language should be maintained. Those who seek their custom as readers know better than to try to challenge that. I know too that businesses or public bodies whose employees communicate with their customers or clients in poor English earn the disdain and even contempt of those who feel they are written or spoken to in a sloppy fashion. Insulting people’s intelligence is never an especially satisfactory method of keeping them happy. When I published the previous two books on the language various teachers of linguistics howled at me in reviews for refusing to accept that language changes. Had they read either book properly they would have deduced that I had done nothing of the sort. For reasons to which I have already alluded, I am not remotely against change in the language, nor do I deny that it happens: I should have to be exceptionally obtuse to take any other view. Such change has happened since the Dark Ages and will continue to do so. What I
maintained was that there is an idea of a standard English, which covers the operation of particular rules of grammar and the meanings of words, and forms a consensus around that idea. If one wishes to be understood by, and indeed to understand, as many people as possible, and to give the impression that one has an informed and intelligent grasp of the language, then it is as well to master these things. An example of the importance of this is the distinction between disinterested and uninterested, which many people seem to think no longer exists. It does exist and it is usually vital to get it right, even if there will be some who are blissfully unaware there is a distinction. A judge who claims to be disinterested in the outcome of the case he is trying is ideal; one who is uninterested could prove a disaster to justice.
Many people wish standard English to remain the principal form of communication in the British Isles – not necessarily in colloquial speech, which has always had an air of casualness and informality – but certainly in formal documents, letters, or in newspaper articles and broadcasters’ scripts. People wish this form of English to survive because they consider it has authority, and that it has authority because it is clear and unambiguous: no one who reads it or hears it, if what they read or hear has been written or spoken correctly, should be in any doubt about its meaning. Equally, that is why people whose business is communication use it. Those who choose not to do so may find themselves at a disadvantage.
It is not least because such a disadvantage is unnecessary that I have written this book, which reflects largely on new problems with the language in the last fifteen years or so since I started to write my first tract on this subject, Strictly English, or problems that have remained tiresomely persistent and, therefore, persistently confusing or irritating. As already noted, new items, experiences, processes and so on often
require a new word, or an old word ‘re-purposed’: look, for example, at the evolution of the meaning of the noun sympathy over the last four centuries, which the dictionary outlines. What I do object to, in an era when a standard dictionary of the highest degree of scholarship exists, is when words are used wrongly out of ignorance, and so-called experts decree that that is a perfectly acceptable usage – and, furthermore, imply it is evidence of a high form of bigotry to condemn such a thing. It does not help that the dictionary occasionally recognises the existence of completely wrong usages of words; wrong because in his or her ignorance the speaker has confused one word with another (see, for example, the entry on flaunt and flout), and not because some new concept or item has come into being that borrows an existing word to describe itself (of which there have been many in recent years, some of them – and I have already given one example, but there are countless others – connected with the latest instalment of the technological revolution: such as tweet, platform, streaming and application ). That is an example of the great fear among some more radical academics, in this respect, of branding anyone as ignorant in his or her use of language; for some of them all usages, however bizarre (and however corrupted the grammar in which such usages are couched), are to be deemed legitimate in the free-for-all world of the evolving language. I do not share that fear, and I do not share it precisely because I do not wish innocent people, often victims of an inadequate education system, to be damaged by such patronising indulgence.
To an extent this book reviews progress – or rather the lack of it – in keeping English on the straight and narrow in the last decade or so, using some specific examples I collected from the printed and broadcast media in the couple of years immediately after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic that began in the early months of 2020. I still shudder at the
memory of a BBC reporter, in the late 2000s, discussing foul play in a football match and describing one of the participants as having ‘flaunted’ the rules. For a moment I pictured the footballer running round the pitch waving a rule book at his comrades, opponents, the officials and the crowd. It is regrettable that the dictionary now concedes that flaunt has been known to be used in place of flout. It might as well say that fart is an acceptable substitute for anyone devoid of the brainpower needed to use the word fort.
When it comes to grammar, there is a logic behind it that, as it has developed over the centuries, has helped eliminate ambiguity from the language. The violations of grammar since I wrote my previous two books appear mainly to concern the elimination of prepositions, a habit we have imported from America, and of which many examples are cited in the A to Z that follows. Because we appear to live in a fractious and unhappy world, one of the most frequent examples is the removal of the prepositions associated with the verb to protest. One used to protest in favour of something, or against something, or about something: now one simply protests something, and to hell with the preposition or prepositional phrase. Another example is the verb to debate which, I mention in the text, can cause confusion when its preposition is abandoned. One would normally say ‘I debated against John’ or ‘I debated with John’. If one simply says ‘I debated John’, then the listener is left with the impression that John was the subject under discussion.
This brings us back to young Garth. Children are not to be blamed for struggling to understand why one day their livelihoods, or in extreme cases even their lives, may come to depend on precision in language, and be grateful for the freedom from confusion or misunderstanding that correct grammar generally provides. It is astonishing how many ambitious immigrants to Britain grasp this, whereas those
who have lived here for generations fail to do so. Articulacy and precision in speech and writing are, history more often than not relates, central to such success, as many who originally spoke English as a second language will readily testify. It is notable, too, that many of the experts who rejoice in the ‘anything goes’ school of British English speak and write correct English themselves; and the periodicals and newspapers they tend to read do so too.
Crossing the Atlantic
Long before colonialism was formally dead and buried the English, or British, had lost control of their language. As English-speaking people were exported, transported or simply migrated to distant parts of the globe, the language they took with them began to develop of its own accord and not in accord with the English spoken in the British Isles after their departure from the native shore. In some regards the language they took with them remained more conservative than that continuing to develop in the mother country: that the Americans still say gotten, and are careful in their use of the subjunctive mood in a way that hardly anyone in the British Isles now is, reflects this, and not some degree of perversity on the part of the descendants of those emigrants. In that respect, Americans speak and write English just as our common forebears did four hundred years ago. But as American life, society and culture have diverged from British life in those four centuries, so have various words, idioms and grammatical constructions. Such a process was inevitable; and the Americans have a perfect right to develop their version of English in whatever way their culture dictates. And, equally inevitably, there have developed different dialects and standards within the American version: the relatively
rarefied diction of magazines such as the New Yorker, or newspapers such as the Washington Post, does not match with the American English one hears in films or television programmes, or reads on certain popular American websites. However, just as America has colonised much of the world with McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola, so it is colonising much of the English-speaking world (and not just the British Isles) with its version of our common language. Given the sheer size (a population five times that of the United Kingdom) and the domination of the Anglophone world in the digital age this should be no source of surprise. This has been the most prevalent current in British English in the last fifteen years or so, and it is a direct result of the ubiquity of American entertainment in cinemas, on television and (via the internet) on computer screens. Indeed, the velocity of change and what seems like the almost daily awareness of new, intrusive idioms or expressions in our supposedly shared language is directly attributable to digital media, and the way in which American media of that sort dominates the Anglosphere.
Culturally, therefore, America has a huge influence on the English-speaking world, and nowhere more than in the very place from which the English language originated. In this book I point out the most common occurrences of American English in the language spoken here, and argue that there is no reason not to maintain the distinction between the two versions of the tongue. The alternative is to allow the American variant and its idioms to swamp British English, and to do away with the historical distinctiveness that has long suggested that the British Isles has a culture, or perhaps more correctly a series of cultures, of its own. Perhaps within another decade or two the American cultural force will have proved irresistible, and my and others’ attempts to try to prevent it will have failed. For the moment, given the
unanswerable point that we are separate cultures, I see no reason not to carry on fighting. After all, we do not yet drive on the right side of the road, and we are not in the habit of eating grits.
Yet it will be argued that the language belongs to all of us who use it, and we users can do pretty much as we like with it. If an overwhelming mass of speakers of British English decide to use the American variant of the language, then that is their privilege. In that sense language is a democracy, and if most people choose to speak it in a certain way then others will be forced to follow. Something similar happened in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England: the Norman conquerors and their immediate descendants spoke and conducted official business in French. However, within a hundred years the predominantly Anglo-Saxon argot of the conquered majority was not only thriving in the land, it was part of the linguistic armoury of the governing class too. Within another hundred years everyone was speaking Anglo-Saxon English, with a few French words infiltrating their way into it as required.
Perhaps something similar is under way now: if a generation or two of younger people find it pleasing and natural to speak American English in metropolitan and provincial Britain, then those who choose not to do so will before long find themselves stranded in the manner of the men and women of Norman blood who eight hundred years ago ran up the white flag and resigned themselves to speaking in the tongue of the supposedly conquered people. That they did was, politically, an act of reverse conquest. Perhaps that is what American culture is doing to us now; and every time unwitting descendants of the Anglo-Saxons, or those who have integrated into their language and way of life, talk of a train station, or ask for a raise, or even about standing in line, they contribute to that new act of conquest.
There are also what Ralph Waldo Emerson might have called ‘American traits’ – habits our cousins in the United States have in handling our common language as it continues to develop, and whose germs, thanks to the influence of digital media, we catch all too easily. One of these – a habit admittedly known here throughout the evolution of the language – is of turning nouns into verbs. For example: the noun table has existed since the era of Old English, before the Conquest, but the verb – to table a document for discussion – dates from the fifteenth century. Nouns used to be made into verbs because no satisfactory verb existed. The difficulty now is that nouns are made into verbs where a perfectly serviceable verb or verbal phrase exists: and the world of sport is a serial offender. Someone who is placed in a race – in other words, comes first, second or third – is no longer ‘placed’, but is said to have podiumed or medalled. Perhaps when I have finished writing this I can be said to have ‘booked’. For the moment such silly coinages have the status of slang; it may be in twenty or thirty years’ time that no noun is considered to be unverbable [sic ]. Another American trait of which we must be careful is with the use of the word like to indicate reported speech: ‘So I’m, like, what are you doing? And he’s, like, I’m reading a book.’ This only exists in British English in demotic speech or slang but in America it intrudes into reputable printed matter, and will do so here before too long.
However, if it is true that the language belongs to all who use it, then people who wish to speak American in England have an absolute right to do so, whatever the damage caused to an otherwise sound linguistic structure, and to the joys of cultural distinctiveness. We are brought up, quite rightly, to respect the cultures of others; what a pity we choose, in terms of our language and the peculiarities of British English, not to respect our own. It is very much the same as allowing one to
destroy or misuse any item of which one claims ownership –a person can drive a car in a way that is dangerous purely to him- or herself, or can drink a supply of alcohol until falling over, or can be careless with clothes to the point where they are soiled or torn; so, some feel, can the English language be kicked around, manipulated and damaged and no one should have the right to criticise such a practice.
Many people still share Mrs Garth’s view: those fierce diatribes that some newspapers receive when they use what their readers consider to be ‘bad’ English, remains testimony to that, as do the letters’ columns of the better newspapers in which readers protest about the incomprehensibility of much bureaucratic English, or the dismal impression created by the letters and emails correspondents receive from businesses or corporations of which they are clients. Few things create a bad impression among serious people so effectively as bad English, however much the ‘experts’ might regret this narrow-mindedness.
Politics and the English Language
Such people, who study language professionally, ridicule these supposedly bourgeois attitudes, which conflict with their ideas about the development of language. This is an indication of how effectively language (like so many studies in the humanities) has become politicised and made into a weapon in the culture wars, and in several regards. Relevant here is the assertion that to condemn someone for writing or speaking English badly exhibits some degree of prejudice, and therefore becomes a form of hate crime. Prejudice, however, entails judging some people on grounds other than those of hard evidence, and use of bad English in many people’s views provides precisely that evidence. Thus does the use of British English provide another means of dividing
a society that is already suffering rather too badly from other attempts to polarise groups of people against each other. An ‘anything goes’ view about the use of language – try it on any reasonably educated French citizen about his or her own tongue and see what reply you get – opens that language up to corruption; but it also undermines it as a form of effective communication (and effective communication, as Mrs Garth would tell you, is all about being understood, and understood unambiguously).
As I have indicated, politics (and with it, sad to say, a marked contraction in what we used to understand as free speech) has inserted itself nakedly into the English language even in the last fifteen or so years. Many of you will know that I have borrowed the title of this section from a famous essay that George Orwell published in Horizon in April 1946, an essay that began with the observation: ‘Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.’ He said the decline in the language had political and economic causes; something he stated having already referred to the arguments that ‘Our civilisation is decadent and our language . . . must inevitably share in the general collapse.’
He continued that ‘any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism’; but argued, nonetheless, for a certain standard in English. He accepted that, in the English language, there was such a concept as decline, something that would simply not be entertained by many supposed experts these days; what Orwell called ‘decline’ they would consider simply to be change, or evolution. He warned his readers that the malign effects of certain writers were not solely to blame, but that in terms of the influence on deterioration each of them had, ‘an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form, and so on indefinitely’. He compared the problem with that of a man who drinks heavily because he thinks himself a failure, but then fails all the more because he drinks. Applied to the English language, he said: ‘It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.’ Readers may think I bang on in the entries that follow about the importance of thinking before saying or writing anything. However, the link between precise thinking about the use of language before expressing oneself and the achievement of precision and freedom from ambiguity seems self-evident. Orwell’s point not least is what influences me in emphasising the importance of this. If we can’t convey meaning exactly as we intend, we have failed in our ability to communicate; and as such, our use of language becomes largely futile.
Quoting some passages of ugly and imprecise English, Orwell complained that a ‘mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose’, and he identified the main repository of such inadequate thought and expression as political writing. He felt that in political polemic, or speeches, there was too much abstraction, and that the writing consisted ‘more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house’. Orwell was driving at the deliberate obfuscation of writing with a political message: it was part of the confidence trick, it was there to confuse. Also, it was there to impose the values of the writer, without question, on those of the reader. He said such writing consisted of ‘dying metaphors’; of clumsy and verbose phrases used instead of simple verbs (such as ‘make contact with’ instead of just ‘meet’) or instead of simple conjunctions; of sentences ending with ‘resounding commonplaces’; of ‘pretentious diction’ that was ‘used to dignify the sordid processes of international
politics’; of ‘meaningless words’, which he defined as ‘in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader’. He deplored the use of the passive voice, because it detached the agent from the action, and of a preference for classical words over ‘Saxon’ ones.
These all contributed to the ‘swindles and perversions’ he found inherent in much political writing, writing he believed was intended principally to deceive those who read it. He set out various rules, of which perhaps the two most significant were that the writer should ask him- or herself ‘What am I trying to say?’ and, having said it, to ask further ‘Could I put it more shortly?’ And he emphasised again that if one could not be bothered there were always ‘ready-made phrases’ available, which simply indicated that the writer or speaker had delegated his or her thinking to someone else. Expressing his feelings at witnessing some political oratory or reading some political prose, Orwell said that ‘one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy . . . A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.’ In 1946, in political discourse, Orwell felt there was nothing new to say: and the use of flannel to say it, the ‘vagueness’ he lambasts again and again, is, he feels, all part of the euphemism essential to make political concepts palatable to most of the electorate.
Since he wrote this, almost eighty years ago, the relationship between politics and the English language has become even more complicated, though the fundamental problems he identified – about executing the confidence trick of which so much politics consists – remain unchanged. The rise of identity politics has had its impact on the way some people speak and write, and this has seeped more widely into the language, thanks to the broadcast media in particular
obeying new and specially manufactured linguistic conventions in order to avoid offending any self-declared minority. Whether we like it or not, this has an effect on the way some people feel they have to speak or write English. In my entry on pronouns I discuss the effect that ideas about gender – ideas held by a small minority and considered irrelevant or just bizarre by many outside that group – have had on English.
According to data published by the National Library of Medicine on an official website of the United States government, ‘the true prevalence of intersex’ – people who by their phenotypes are ‘not classifiable as either male or female’ – amounts to 0.018 per cent of the population; in other words, 99.982 per cent of human beings are born either male or female (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/). I am not for a moment disputing that, once they achieve the age of reason, some of those people may wish to exercise their human right to think differently about their gender; some of them may even wish to have a series of surgical procedures that change or ‘re-assign’ their gender from male to female, or vice versa. Others may wish to consider themselves as embracing both genders, or no gender at all: I cite in my entry on pronouns the opinion of a learned woman who asserts what she calls the ‘fantasy’ of gender. It is her right to do that; but it is also the right of others to disagree with her, and I suspect I am not alone in doing so. Because this question has become so highly politicised it has, in Orwellian fashion, proceeded to have an effect on our language. Before this debate arose, the pronouns they and their were used informally in constructions where one would correctly, in formal writing, say ‘he or she’ (as opposed to ‘he and she’) or ‘his or her’ (as opposed to ‘his and her’): for example, someone might be asked ‘Would you prefer John or Mary to give you their opinion first?’ The correct grammar
of that sentence would be ‘Would you prefer John or Mary to give you his or her opinion first?’ but no one would say and virtually no one would write such a sentence because of its prolixity. Now, this plural pronoun has been adopted not by those who wish to talk about both genders in a construction where singular pronouns would technically be required, but by those who have identified themselves as having elements of both genders. Some singular human beings now insist on using, and having others use, the pronouns they and them in referring to themselves, despite these pronouns in such usage having long been considered ungrammatical or illogical. Indeed, some people now instruct others at the end of formal letters or emails how they wish to be addressed, with the instructional ‘(Pronouns: they/them)’ by their signatures. This can indeed sometimes be helpful, or deemed redundant when one receives a letter signed by John Smith with the instruction ‘(Pronouns: he/him)’ next to it.
As with so much in life, this must remain a matter of personal taste: although it has always been good manners to address people in the way they wish to be addressed, it will grate with some to hear a person who appears to be a man or a woman being described as ‘they’; others will find it preposterous and, if so, good manners require that they keep such a view to themselves [sic ]. Either such a usage will become accepted, and in ten years’ time no one will think anything of it, or it won’t, and there will be a reversion to using the pronoun we think a person requires, until or unless we are told otherwise. It will depend on how desperate the desire to avoid causing offence becomes, and how influential or otherwise the minority who wish to alter the language is; it may not form part of the experience of large sections of society. It is deeply regrettable that throughout the ages minorities have come in useful to a certain section of society for a form of verbal target practice; human nature has often caused this
