A Nod to My Unpaid Intern

About two years after I graduated from college I secured a spot as an unpaid intern for the Texas Observer in Austin. It's a scrappy little political magazine, quite popular in its way. On my first day, in an attempt to impress the editors, I fell asleep on the couch. This became my routine: Arrive, sleep for 15 minutes, get up, drink coffee, get to work.

My work was proofreading, mostly. And making coffee, sometimes, though I tended to botch that task. I also attended magazine functions, sold subscriptions, folded t-shirts and generally Helped Out. During this time it occurred to me: I need an unpaid intern.

Flash forward three years and here I am, in Paris, with an unpaid intern. His name is Michael Camacho. His other titles include: boyfriend.

His unpaid internship duties mainly pertain to nannying. Michael is, for example, in charge of fighting with Meyer when Meyer is seized with physical ferocity and cannot be placated with anything other than a good old-fashioned throw-down. (Or TV or chocolate but we try to save those for Emergencies.) Michael and Meyer can duke it out in the living room whilst Adam and I sit in the kitchen, calmly drawing, talking about what kinds of dreams we'd had the night before.

As it turns out, though, Michael has proved his usefulness in other ways. He is now also my official unpaid Blog Research Intern, as he has taken it upon himself to read The Mother Tongue; English and How it Got That Way, by Bill Bryson. If it sounds like the perfect book for a linguistics blogger then you're right, it is. But who has time?

So I have allowed my intern to read it for me instead, and he has shared some of the best chunks with me. He has also paraphrased, marked pages, and let me peruse the book EVEN WHILE HE'S READING IT in order to add tidbits of information to this blog entry. Bravo, Intern. Bravo.

I cannot pay you right now but the experience will really bolster your resume.

It deserves note that the word intern is French in origin. It was not used in English until the late 19th century. At the time, it was used solely to denote a medical student, as it was taken from the French interne, meaning, ahem, medical intern.

Of course, the relationship between English and French has long been close; I didn't realize how close until my Intern told me that there was a time when British rulers much preferred French to the harsh babbling language of peasants which would later become the most widely spoken language in the world.

English came together in much the same way that England did, formed in bits after the Romans left and named after the Angles, a Germanic tribe that spoke perhaps the earliest form of English. The French word for English (Anglais) respects these roots as does the French word for England, Angleterre (literally, land of the Angles).

Of course, by the time England came to be, as such, it was inhabited by Saxons as well. Hence, the Anglo-Saxons, who could have no way of knowing, at the time, that they would one day form the middle part of WASP and be featured on countless sitcoms.

There is not much record of the coming together of English or England, for according to Bryson the Anglo-Saxons were, "functionally speaking, illiterate." The first written sentence in English (or the earliest version thereof) was hence found on a coin in a field in Suffolk. It reads: "This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman." And then, of course, you have a long literary lapse followed by Beowolf whose author had no way of knowing that, one day, Angelina Jolie would play Grendel's hot mom.

Anyway, to keep quickly paraphrasing, the Anglo-Saxons spoke the earliest form of English, which withered a bit on the vine during the Norman invasions and the aristocratic insistence on speaking French. Nevertheless, English is nothing if not persistent. After the English stopped speaking French on account of being mocked by the Parisians for speaking an ugly form of French, the returned to a richer, fuller English. About 85% of the original Old English had been lost by then, but, as Bryson points out:

"4,500 Old English words survived - about 1% of the total words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on."

These are of course all words that do not sound like their French versions. Some of the seemingly less important words, however (including telephone, sim card, rechargeable and charger) DO actually sound a lot like French as I learned yesterday when I translated in the mobile phone store for Michael's mom's friend. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but it was a difficult task indeed: Cell phone plans and operations are difficult enough to understand in English. But no mind.

back to the book: Interesting, non? I will probably have to read this book as soon as I am done reading all the other five million books on my list. Either that or I will have my intern read them for me, and paraphrase. But not now. Right now, he's napping.