If there’s something I really can’t stand, it’s the officious voice of officialdom, telling me how to speak a language that it can barely speak itself. And so it is with euros. In the run-up to E-Day, we are being given strict instructions by Mr and Miss Whiplash up at the euro control tower on how the word is to be written, spoken and used. Few of those instructions make linguistic sense.
The introduction of the Maltese lira was similarly fraught with error. You might have forgotten, but when we went decimal way back in the early 1970s, the pound was still officially a pound in English and a lira only in Maltese, and we used the same curious pound symbol that the British still use for theirs for years afterwards. Then at some point, somebody in our fantastic 1980s government decided that the barely educated British tourists brought in by its downmarket tourism policies were getting confused. They couldn’t distinguish between the British pound and the Maltese pound, because they had the same name and used the same symbol. And so a new English name was devised – the Maltese lira – only it didn’t work in English because it wasn’t an English word at all, but the Maltese word for the English word “pound”. They both mean the same thing, a pound of silver – though the Maltese word is derived ultimately from the ancient word for the scales used to weigh the silver. People with a reasonable level of education just couldn’t bring themselves to say: “That costs 10 liras” or even “That costs 10 liri.” And they still can’t do so today, which means that in spoken English, the Maltese pound has stayed a pound.
A new symbol was devised to reflect the concept of a Maltese lira: “Lm”. I was working as an office clerk in those days, which is how I know how very long after the changeover to decimals it was before the Maltese lira was introduced to replace the Maltese pound. When we changed to decimals I was in primary school, but when we were told that the Maltese pound was now officially a Maltese lira, I was driving a car.
Sending bills was part of my duties, so I embraced the new regime. The pound sign on my typewriter was put out to pasture and I started typing ‘lM’ instead. Having that kind of mind, I had made the natural and practical assumption that because the initials stood for lira Maltija, the ‘l’ should be in lower case and the ‘M’ in upper case. Lots of people must have done the same, because the next thing we knew, there was a flurry of instructions from on high (not so much Miss Whiplash in those days as Mr Knuckleduster and his little friend GBH). The official and only acceptable way to denote the Maltese lira, we were told, was “Lm” – in other words, the reversal of what it should be. To this day, I still grit my teeth when writing it. It goes against every grain of my being to denote a proper noun with a small letter, and an ordinary noun with a capital. Luckily, we’ll soon be done with that piece of ignorance that is embedded into all our financial transactions.
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Ah, but what luck: more fun and games await us in the New Year. Indeed, they have started already. People have taken the liberty of writing and pronouncing the words “euro” and “euros” any way they please. This cannot possibly be allowed, so officialdom has felt the need to step in and arrest the process.
A friend in the media has received instructions from the public and media relations office of the National Euro Changeover Committee. In all magazine and newspaper articles in Maltese, she was told, the word is to be “ewro” and not “euro”, and whichever the language, it must always begin with a small “e”. We’re in agreement on that last one, because it’s not a proper noun – hence pound, lira, forint, dinar and dollar. Deutschmark starts with a capital letter because it has the name of the country (a proper noun) incorporated into it. You can argue that it’s the same with the word “euro”, which comes from Europe – but that’s not the case because euro is an invented word to denote a currency. It is does not have the same linguistic status as ‘European’ (the equivalent of Deutsch).
I am also delighted that Mr and Miss Whiplash at the NECC are telling people to stick to the mathematically correct decimal point and not to adopt that crazy continental habit of substituting it with a comma while leaving out the zeros. Try explaining to your maths teacher why you have written down a price as EUR12,5 instead of EUR12.50, and you’ll see what I mean.
Needless to say, the National Euro Changeover Committee and I are not in agreement on the word “ewro”. In fact, I plan never to use it, as I think it’s a hideous accommodation of lazy pronunciation, though I do understand that because the rot had already set in with Ewropa, logic dictated that the name for the currency had to follow suit. Like writing Lm instead of lM, I wince when I have to say Ewropa when speaking Maltese, instead of the Europa that comes more naturally (ah, but then we would have been forced to spell it Juropa; I should be thankful for small mercies). It is like telling me that I should ask for pirmli at the pharmacy instead of for pilloli, because the number of uneducated people who can’t pronounce words eclipses the number of educated people who can, which means that their pronunciation becomes official and the rest of us must abide by it. In Britain, the official usage is the Queen’s. In Malta, it’s that of the illiterate man who left school at 10. That says a lot.
Nor am I in agreement with the NECC’s instructions that the English plural is “euro” (“The word ‘euros’ does not exist!”, my friend was told, with an exclamation mark). Whether I agree or not is irrelevant, in any case: the NECC is just plain wrong about this and it’s not a matter of my opinion; it’s a matter of fact. As usual, we’re dragging behind everyone else and trying to invent the wheel while everybody else is racing around in a Ferrari. There was a similar debate in Ireland, the only other officially English-speaking country in the Eurozone (capital letter because it’s a proper noun). So obviously, we should be looking to Ireland as a model, rather than taking instruction or advice from any one of the other Eurozone countries, all of which speak and write English like something out of a comedy sketch about “continentals”, on the Fast Show. You don’t ask an Italian, a Frenchman or a German woman how to speak English, for heaven’s sake.
When Ireland joined the Eurozone in 2002, educated people took great care to speak and write the plural as “euro” and “cent”, rather than “euros” and “cents”, though the latter are what the language itself demands. Euros and cents were for the uneducated. The educated seemed to believe they were following the orders of officialdom, and that the single and plural of euro and cent really were the same. Then Michael Everson went on the radio. He is a linguist and script encoder whose job it was to build the euro into our computer systems. His central area of expertise is writing-systems, and specifically the representation of these systems in formats for computers and digital media. The only reason that people in Ireland are saying “euro” and “cent” when they mean “euros” and “cents”, he said on that radio show in 2002, is because of a perceived notion that at some stage somebody in authority said “Oh, the European Commission wants us to say ‘euro’ and ‘cent’ when we mean the plural.” Not only does the Commission not have the right to tell us how to form the plural of words in our own language, but it never actually said anything of the sort.
Everson explained that the rule applies only to official translations of EU legislation – in other words, formal and official documents that use the kind of legalese not spoken or written in real life. He said there is no justification for this rule even in that context, because it doesn’t make any sense. He also made the rational point that what governs the translations of official EU documents cannot be made to govern the written and spoken language of people in ordinary life. In other words, when you and I speak and write, it’s a matter of euros and cents, and nobody can tell us otherwise. Or rather, they can try, and we have every right to ignore them.
Prompted by his interviewer, Everson said even more: “I am on a bit of a crusade about this because we’re facing a socio-linguistic disaster right now. It’s almost class-ridden. You have ordinary folk on Thomas Street and Camden Street saying “euros and cents” quite happily. And then you have the others, who are being very careful to say “euro” and “cent”.” There was a chuckle on air when they spoke about an Irish politician who had been on television a little while before. That politician was so careful to say ‘cent’ when speaking about the new currency in the plural, that when he came to speak about American currency, he found himself saying ‘dollars and cent’.
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People to whom English is not a first language are unaware that the use of the singular to denote a currency in the plural is working-class slang and not correct usage. The Queen is never going to say “fifty pound”. If you hear somebody English (or a Maltese returned immigrant) say: “That cost me five pound”, you can make certain immediate assumptions about his or her socio-educational background, unless this person has just adopted the slang to be hip, in which case it will be obvious in other ways. Incidentally, it’s the same in the US: people with little or no education use the singular to denote the plural when talking about prices: “That cost me five dollar;” “That’ll be 30 cent.” Why do you think the notorious rapper’s stage-name is Fifty Cent and not Fifty Cents? It’s not because he’s been listening to the NECC or reading the European Commission’s directives on the translation of legislation. It’s because of his deprived background.
There is no way on earth that I am ever going to say or write “This costs three euro and 20 cent.” I wasn’t born in the gutter and I didn’t leave school semi-literate at 15. People who say “cent” when they mean “cents”, whether they are in Britain, the US, Malta or any other English-speaking country, are on the wrong side of the educational divide. And no rules laid down by the NECC are ever going to change that.