English lacks passion (but certainly not innuendo)

First off, I’d better clarify that I’m talking about the English language here, not English people. If you speak fluent English, whether you’re a native speaker or not, has it ever struck you what a “cold language” English can be? Have you considered the abundance, the veritable cornucopia of words, there is to express mediocre sentiment? How speakers of English endlessly proclaim that something is bothersome, troublesome, annoying or mildly irritating? It’s as though these words were designed to untiringly scratch the surface of human emotion, rather than reaching for the depths, the genuine and the heartfelt.

More animated words exist of course, it’s just that in everyday life we don’t tend to use them. They’re like one’s best suit, only to be taken out of the closet on special occasions. How often do you chat to someone who, when asked how they’re doing, responds “I feel wonderfully joyful at the moment”, or “I’m tethering on the brink of despair and feel a desperate sense of grief”. More passionate emotions, and therefore by default, expressions, are private, they cannot be shared lightly in the English language, whereas blander phrases are paraded about and flaunted for all the world to hear. It’s ok to be annoyed, but heaven forbid should your language display signs of something akin to deep sorrow, ecstatic bliss or any other passionate emotion.

I confess I have sometimes despaired at this linguistic mediocrity – when you have a language as gorgeously rich in expression as the English language, why not go wild with it, why not litter it with far-out phrases, pepper it with flair, spice it up to your heart’s content? Then I learnt Spanish instead and that slowed this frank frustration somewhat – there is no problem using passionate words in Spanish to describe any emotion under the sun. Except perhaps mild irritation, slight annoyance and you catch my drift…

The other reason I calmed down was my comparatively slow discovery of innuendo. I hail from a nation where the subtlety of innuendo is definitely less appreciated, for the simple reason that we don’t have a problem talking about different topics, including, and especially, sex. Sweden, for all its flaws, has a fairly open and healthy attitude to all sorts of things and it took me a good long while to grasp that in the UK, if I accidentally said something as commonplace as the word “it”, in the wrong place, at the wrong time or with the wrong intonation, people might unexpectedly start tittering and rolling their eyes.

It took me some time to cotton on to, and appreciate, the inherent, giggle-worthy charms of perfectly timed and delivered innuendo – the suggestive art of insinuation, of hinting. The English do innuendo like no other. Never has being unable to talk about sex been such a blessing, or led to quite so many excellent films, TV-series, stand-up comedy shows, you name it. Imagine Monty Python without innuendo. There would never have been any winking or nudging and certainly no search for the Holy Grail, not to mention the sad(der) life poor Brian would have had. I can forgive the English language just about anything, because of this one endearing habit, even if most English people think I’m off for some in-the-dark, gay sex, every time I’m heading to the sauna, something that to me is a healthy Scandie habit involving birch twigs and sweating.