My siblings and I learned to speak English the summer of 1999, after immigrating to Canada from Pakistan. But the rub here is-did I use that idiom correctly?-if English is the only language that I can claim proficiency in, shouldn’t I be able to speak and write it idiomatically and well, even if it’s not my first language? I have a tough time speaking English idiomatically, which is why I copy the words of my favorite writers-in hopes I might learn from them appropriate order and flow, which they know intuitively. This frantic self-checking, my need to endlessly corroborate the same facts, was spearheaded in grade twelve when I wrote in an essay that something was “a double-sided sword.” In her menacing red ink, above this ultimately flat attempt at sounding sage, my teacher scrawled: “It’s actually ‘double-edged sword.’” Of course, I recall muttering to myself when I received the graded essay, too shy to smack myself on my forehead among my classmates.
I remembered that the English language has an idiom that expresses this phenomena: “to buck the trend.” But I didn’t have confidence in my memory, so I trawled through dictionary entries and conducted a few Google searches until I was sure enough that the idiom meant what I was trying to express: buck here means “to defy expectations.” Finally, I felt secure enough in my knowledge to write in my review, “ delicately bucks our expectations.” I still felt it sounded clunky, but my editor (a white person) didn’t edit it out, so I must’ve used it correctly. To slide across the floor with “a frantic sloppiness.” What a stunning combination of words, I thought to myself as I copied that sentence down at least ten times in 2017.Įarlier this year, I wrote a movie review and I wanted to describe how the movie goes against viewers’ expectations.
This is because English is not my first language, and I’m convinced I’m unable to write with the fluidity, the complexity, the flourishes of authors who have English as their first language.įor instance, from Angelica Jade Bastién’s essay “ By the Sea :” “When she hears Roland coming back to the room one day, she plugs up the peephole and slides across the floor with a frantic sloppiness.” I turn to this sentence again and again. I hope certain turns of phrases, certain ways to describe things and movements, certain idioms the writers use will begin to come naturally to me. I think getting my hand into the habit of writing them and rewriting them might get my brain into the habit of thinking like them. Reading thirty pages might take me all day because I spend so much time copying down by hand the phrases, sequence of words-even wholesale blocks of paragraphs-that sound nice to me. I’m a slow reader-of books, of articles, of anything.
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