A Word to the Wise from Charlie Haylock
Posted on 3rd March 2024
If a history of our spoken language doesn’t sound like your idea of a fun night out, then I have to assume you’ve never spent time in the company of Charlie Haylock. Combining an encyclopaedic knowledge of the roots and development of our native tongue with a rakish wit, Haylock had the audience captivated with his explanation of how the English language was first established and why it’s become the dominant linguist force in the world.
If you’ve ever wondered why Shakespeare’s plays don’t rhyme anymore, whether or not you can split an infinitive, or why Stiffkey is pronounced Stookey, then Haylock is your man. Using nothing more than a lo-fi flip chart, Haylock demonstrated how language is inexorably entwined with history and the movement of people. Far from being set in stone, the English language owes much of its ubiquity to its fluidity. Using the building blocks of old English, it voraciously gobbled up words from all over the word, building a vocabulary twice the size of French, the next in line when it comes to world count. These fun facts, and countless more, were presented by Haylock with such charm and good humour that it was easy to miss just how artfully he marshalled complex ideas into easily digested bite sized chunks.
Haylock rounded off his talk with a journey around the country, not only revealing what a gifted mimic he is, but how the shape of the mouth and the position of the tongue dictates how we speak. Perhaps most importantly, he invited his audience to celebrate, rather than denigrate, regional accents before taking questions from the floor. If proof be needed of his thesis, both during the talk and the Q&A session, his audience hung off his every word no matter how that word was pronounced. I’m already looking forward to his return on the 21st June to the Corn Hall when he will be sharing his experience of working on The Dig, teaching Ralph Fiennes how to speak Suffolk. The date very appropriately, is Suffolk Day. You can book your tickets here.