August-September 2025
Dear Friends,
How adaptable our wonderful language is. From brutish grunts to the eloquence of Shakespeare it dwells easily on our lips and in our minds and, if I may cheekily adapt the Bard’s words, it “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name”, offering us knowledge, reasoning, explication and understanding. What a choice of expression there is: too much, one might say. Out of all the welter of words that spill over the globe every minute, I suggest two that might be used more often than any other – whether spoken by Anglophones or not. These are: Okay and Awright. They may be used this way round: “Okay?” – “Awright!” or this way: “Awright?” – Okay!” What more could you ask of any two simple, wholly international words? (I know, Awright is really two words!) And with the embellishment of gestures of hands, faces, heads or shoulders, their scope for communication is great, whichever country of the world you may be in.
From taxi drivers in the strangest places to chatty professors who spoke hardly any English in others, these two little words – with appropriate gestures – have helped me to describe what I and others wanted and our satisfaction on receiving it. The words don’t easily lend themselves to sarcasm or cruelty: they fit naturally into their place with genuine feelings of concern. If a poor friend of yours can’t afford a proper meal, you’ll smile as you slip him a fifty-pound note, cordially enquiring “Awright?” and he will gratefully murmur “Okay, thank you.” But if a thief with a weapon has just made your pocket lighter by the same amount you might, with a caustic glint in your eye, enquire: “Okay? Happy now?” with no sense of cordiality. Many facts of life have a bad side, but it is not the fault of the words.
While at sea, I had a captain who would never allow anyone to use Okay or Awright: “Unseamanly”, he would say. “Lazy, ignorant speech. Stop it now!” But he wasn’t aware of something that would become important one day. In a later world, when politicians of all sorts would struggle woefully for “Levelling up”, Okay and Awright, even in the briefest sense, would become great levellers – leveller ups, if you like – bringing a welcome friendliness and approachability to a coming relationship, which, however short or long, will quickly have you and your interlocutor on equal terms. I’m sure that this is what my captain would certainly not permit, and as a senior sort of chap, he must be allowed that.
When meeting a rather nervous new colleague at work, the attitude of some people is often defensive or hostile. When introduced, they may grunt, with an upward tilting of the nose, “Uh?” But, encouraged by a smile and a nod, they might easily add, “Okay. Awright, mate. Pleased to meet you. Come right in.” The newcomer is immediately raised to the level of the comradeship of the staff.
Speech is essential for the brain’s development. There have been cases of people stranded on a desert island who succeeded in keeping their sanity by talking to things, or animals that they managed to capture and train. As related in Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe tells how he managed to tame and talk to some of the goats on the island that he inhabited for a while, as practice for his book.
A member of our church who impressed me greatly was Ruth Healey, who taught children born deaf to talk. This task seemed impossible to me, but Ruth explained that the first thing she taught the children was to make simple puffing actions with the mouth and going on from there so that they would eventually speak in a way that they couldn’t even imagine before. Like the faculties of sight and hearing, speech is a function of the brain whose communication is life itself in action, no matter how small the words may be.
‘Okay’ is probably the most used word in the world. Many years ago, my wife Bronda and I enlisted in a course of instruction – ten people or so – in using the computer. It was a very good course, but what impressed me was the number of times in a minute that our teacher used the ‘Okay’? word. It would appear up to ten times in a sentence, but it seemed a natural thing to do because it came in the rhythm of his speech as a genuine desire to know whether he was successfully doing his job. It was like needing a permanent form of reassurance. And that is what we all need, isn’t it?
Yours sincerely,
Roger Tarbuck