G*Nice: In a matter of speaking

As an English guy working with a local company, I find I have one recognisable "skill" that my colleagues regularly approach me for. They assume I am an expert in written and spoken English. Now obviously compared to many who have English as their second or third language, I suppose that I am a point of reference, but I actually know less about my mother tongue than maybe I should. Let me explain.

Even at school, when I was forced to learn German and French, it became apparent that there is a science to language that I was unaware of when it came to English. I obviously knew the principles of grammar - nouns, verbs, adjectives - but I was never taught about the names of tenses.

So when in foreign language classes I was told about tenses like the perfect, pluperfect, dative etc, I had never heard these terms, although I was using them in practice in everyday speech. That's a ‘by the way' in this story, just illustrating that for me anyway, I probably didn't know as much as I should about my lingo.

Now the problem I face is that my spoken English is literally that… my spoken English! By that I mean, it is a product of growing up in East London where we have our own dialect, slang and way of using the language that doesn't conform to the standard rules that others would expect. I will admit that my spoken style is incredibly lazy and heavy with all the bad habits that come with not following the rules.

When talking, I drop letters that I feel I don't need to recognise to put my point across, so "h's" for me are totally unnecessary. I can say "ello" for example as a greeting and just leave the "h" on the shelf for others to bother with.

Not just that, I will change the phonetic sound of vowels in a word to reduce the number of facial muscles I need to use to express it. So "world", which should be said with a nice rounded mouth contortion to express the "o", will lazily be replaced with an "e", so I can spit it out as "werld".

I have never been made aware that my bad habits have any importance for me in getting by and presenting myself as a functioning human being. However, when asked by colleagues for my expert guidance to help them improve their language skills I am suddenly aware of what a bad teacher I might turn out to be. I start to feel like I have been somehow caught out in a lie and become profusely apologetic for not being the man they mistakenly placed some faith in!

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks and in these moments I start to feel like the smelliest, scruffiest mongrel in human form chained to a fence just inanely barking, making no sense but making a lot of irritating noise pollution! Maybe I should learn to balance a ball on my nose as compensation?

Down-boy-ingly yours