English and the English in Wimbledon
Thursday, June 28th, 2007Ian Ritchie, the chief executive of Wimbledon tennis club, quoted in full by the International Herald Tribune- no doubt for the amusement of their American readers:
“We take very seriously being a sort of world-class event, hopefully”
“And to a degree there’s always been those people who have said it’s a bit cloistered. Maybe with the roof off, I don’t know, it is going to get people more excited”
Great fencing language! (As well as the much despised but almost standard There has been people). He could almost be speaking Japanese with that much use of vagueness. No wonder British English is so popular in Japan (although a certain amount of anti-Americanism is also involved). And ditto as a Brit learning Japanese, you can really express the way you don’t want express yourself.
The most fluent foreigner I have ever met was Italian, but there was something utterly un-Japanese about the way she spoke- no umming and ahhing at all. Japanese and British English must be the only two languages where you make yourself sound more like the natives by lacking fluency.