King’s English, Anyone? – April 2025

By Park Nahm-Sheik

Britons take pride in their roles as custodians of the English language, which they often refer to as the King’s or the Queen’s English, depending on whether the reigning monarch at the time is a king or a queen. When Elizabeth II was on the throne, for example, it was the Queen’s English. Not being a Briton, I really don’t care that much what name standard British English goes by. As far as I am concerned, any kind of English is fine so long as it is intelligible. I would greatly appreciate every English word employed being clearly spelled out letter by letter and articulated syllable by syllable. I would certainly appreciate all English expressions deployed steering clear of overly dialectal or idiolectal turns.

A “substandard” variety of English may indeed pose somewhat of a communication issue. Once, I had to cope with the Kiwi variety of English when I was studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoa back in the summer of 1965. One of my classmates, who was from New Zealand, said something like “I just ‘kaim’ here to-‘dai,’” meaning “I just came here today.” His accent sounded downright weird at first. With the passage of time, though, his accent did not sound so out of this world as it did initially. The novelty soon wore off.

The fact is that most of my Korean teachers of English also had quite an awkward accent. Although it was normally very clumsy, their accent did not really constitute that much of a speed bump to my ultimate mastery of the language. The truth is that I learned much of my English from those very teachers whose English was coarse, to put it mildly.

Anything but comfy as it was, my journey through the wonderland of English came with quite a few eye-opening moments as well. I got to be pretty good at the language by the time I went to the University of Hawaii (UH) and the East- West Center (EWC) in the summer of 1965. In fact, I got to be one of the two top scorers on the test of English co-administered by UH and EWC. With hundreds of students from all over Asia and the Pacific taking the test, it was a pleasant surprise. Almost something of a feat! The other top scorer was Mimi B. P. Lowe, a graduate of Nanyang University in Singapore. It turns out that I outperformed a myriad of other applicants from India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. They were individuals who had learned to speak English at their mother’s knee, as it were, so that English was practically their mother tongue.

“My journey through the wonderland of English came with quite a few eye-opening moments as well.”

Later, my appointment to the Seoul National University (SNU) faculty might have been inconceivable if not for the UH-EWC portion of my bona fides. I am indebted especially to two academics going back to my UH-EWC days. They were UH Linguistics Professor George W. Grace and Dean Lee Hahn-Been of the SNU School of Public Administration. Their references were indispensable to my 1969 SNU faculty appointment. As luck would have it, Dr. Lee was a visiting scholar at both UH and EWC, when I was there as an aspiring graduate student from Korea. In his reference, Prof. Grace stated that my written English was a couple of notches above that of the average native American college graduate. And Dean Lee personally saw to it that the meaning of Prof. Grace’s remark was heard loud and clear by the entire SNU community with specific reference to the faculty selections committee.

Lest it be forgotten, I also have greatly benefited from my work as TEFL R&D adviser at the Seoul offices of the U.S. Peace Corps in Korea in the late 1960s. I nostalgically look back upon my collaborations with Peace Corps volunteer Arthur Goldberg and his supervising coordinator George Worth, and I also appreciate having worked alongside other Peace Corps colleagues like Bryna Kaitz and Fred Blair, all of whom presented me with such fond memories to this day. Those were the good old days, indeed!

As a lifelong practitioner of ELT, I have diligently been searching for a royal road to English. With this holy grail as my guiding light, I taught English at two high schools in Gwangju, at Seoul National University in Seoul, and at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In addition, I earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, a master’s degree in theoretical linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, and a PhD in applied linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

My conclusion at the end of this checkered EFL/ ELT career was that infatuation with linguistics might not necessarily be the wisest pathway to English fluency. Nothing but endless engagement with real English can pave the way to a genuine command of the language. No amount of theory could ever be the road to perfect English. Neither would any amount of formal teaching and classroom learning produce the King’s English! As far as I am concerned, only practice makes perfect. Remember this and you will be A-okay no matter what. Immersion in linguistics, whether theoretical or applied, will often turn out to be either a fool’s errand or a wild goose chase.