An E Ticket for English
by Michael Bonin, Ph. D. , English Department Head
One summer during my college years I worked at Disneyland. I was a skipper on the Jungle Boat
Cruise, a job with considerable prestige amongst the thousands of Disney “cast members,” as park workers were called. For one thing, Jungle Boat skippers got to wear a cool Indiana Jones hat and khaki pants,
rather than the awesomely dorkoid electric-blue double-knit Dacron zippered jumpsuits ride operators wore
in Tomorrowland. The Three Little Pigs had it worst of all, claustrophobic and blind in a hot, giant plastic pig
head, always being shoved to the ground by mean teenagers.
Jungle Boat skippers never put up with that crap. I can’t believe Disney’s liability attorneys permitted it, but we had real Smith and Wesson .38 service revolvers holstered at the helm, for shooting at the
fiberglass hippos. We knew they fired blanks, but the passengers didn’t, and the report and cordite smoke
were authentic. Those teenagers minded their manners on our boat.
See, on the Jungle Boat we were the ride. The skipper narrated the cruise through the jungle,
delivering a sort of safari-guide stand-up routine.
Welcome aboard the Leaky Tiki. I’m Michael, and I’ll be your skipper for the next three days and two romantic
nights in the jungle. Take a seat – there’s no dancing in the back there, folks. . . no dancing. Dancing is only
allowed on the promenade deck.
As we pull away from the dock, I’d like you to turn and wave to all the smiling natives we leave behind. You
may never see them again.
As we make our way down the Irrawaddy River, feel the mist on your face. Don’t worry. That’s just the monkeys in the trees.
Up ahead, you’ll notice an alligator playing with an elephant. That’s something you don’t see every day. (Long
pause) But I do.
You may groan – my passengers sure did – but as summer jobs go, it wasn’t
a bad way to make some money. (Did you know Disneyland ride operators belong
to the Teamsters union? Boarding school teachers, by the way, do not.) But looking back at it now, after over thirty years in the classroom, I wonder if I ever really
left the Leaky Tiki. I still wear khakis to work. And I’m still standing at the helm,
talking to keep a captive audience interested and amused. I don’t have the Smith
and Wesson anymore, but the Abbey teenagers don’t usually need gunplay to
keep them in line.
P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL
Now, boarding school is no amusement park, in case you were wondering. But I still think of myself as a tour guide to English. For instance, in the Winter Term I teach my Sixth Formers the history of the
English language. For some reason they don’t expect to be fascinated by Verner’s Law, which describes fricative voicing in Proto-Germanic languages, or the Great Vowel Shift of 1350. Yet as we chug our way down
the ages, every bend in the linguistic river offers something of interest, at least by admittedly low English
teacher standards. I’ll throttle down here so we can take a look at “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the very first poem
in English literature.
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc
weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs
ece drihten, or onstealde.
4
He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes weard
ece drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, frea ælmihtig
8
“Middangeard” in line 7 means “middle-earth,” the realm of mankind, and
that’s the Anglo-Saxon word Tolkien lifted for his Lord of the Rings saga, for
Tolkien was the Bosworth and Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford
University. And that odd-looking letter at the beginning of the line, in the word “þa,” is called
a “thorn,” an ancient rune which represented the “th” sound in Old English. Printing presses didn’t have
runic symbols, of course, so centuries later the thorn was printed using a “y”– which is how “the” becomes
“ye” in faux-archaic formulations such as “Ye Olde Souvenir Shoppe.”
Cruise another three centuries down the English river and we meet the Vikings, which is much
more pleasant from our vantage point than when the English were meeting actual Vikings. Our language
doesn’t have a lot of Norse words, but the words which did make it into English are suggestive.
Anger
Skin
Knife
Slaughter
Outlaw
Scorch
Ugly
Scare
Ransack
Wrong
Skull
There you have, in a nutshell, what it was like when Vikings dropped by.
The sightseeing is much more pleasant once we reach Chaucer, writing after the Norman ruling
class had put Anglo-Saxon through a French press for 300 years, so that Middle English sounds virtually
like a Romance language, soft and melodious.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
4
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
That “shire” (“county”) in line 5 makes the hobbit fans onboard perk up again, and they like learning that
the local constable would therefore be called the “shire-reeve” or, as a Nottingham peasant would pronounce it, “sheriff.”
WINTER BULLETIN 2014
The Jungle of English Cruise hasn’t reached familiar territory yet, so I still
have my passengers’ attention. Yet even when we arrive at Shakespeare and Early
Modern English, virtually a home away from home for Abbey students, all steeped
in the classics, there are a few curious sites to point out along the Thames.
Off to starboard, for instance, not far from the Globe Theatre, is the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, in 1599 already the oldest
mental hospital in Europe. Of course, no Cockney would pronounce “Bethlehem” the way we do – to him it would be “bedlam,” and that’s where we get our word for absolute madness.
In fact, to capture the original sound of Shakespearean English,
I tell the students to imagine that in Elizabethan England every
day was National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Try it out, matey.
Frinds, Roomuns, coontrimun, lend me yurr eers.
Oy coom too berry Sayzure, nut too preyze im.
Thee eevul that men doo livz aafturr theym,
The gewd iz aft inturrid with thyr boonz.
Eventually the Leaky Tiki returns to the dock, and it’s time for me to unload the boat.
Now comes the most dangerous part of our journey. . . you guys trying to get out of the parking lot.
Please exit the boat the same way you entered – pushing and shoving. Any children left behind will be taken to
It’s a Small World and forced to sing that dreadful song forever.
Please be sure to tell your friends how much you enjoyed the Jungle Cruise. It helps keeps the lines short.
Disneyland calls itself “The Happiest Place on Earth,” a most dubious claim since, at least while I
worked there, they didn’t serve alcohol anywhere in the park. But these days, as I stand at the lectern and
watch the students file into my classroom, I can almost feel the Leaky Tiki rocking gently under my feet,
ready to get underway – and I’m pretty happy.
Michael Bonin is the head of the English Department
and holds the Dom Damian Kearney Chair in English.
For thirteen years he was an English professor at Gonzaga University, teaching graduate and undergraduate
courses in Shakespeare, Milton, writing, and public
speaking. From 1995-2001, he was chair of Gonzaga’s
English Department. He recieved Gonzaga’s Teacher
of the Year award in 1995 and the Abbey’s Dom Peter
Sidler Award for teaching excellence in 2008. He has
given conference presentations and published articles in
scholarly journals on the topics of Renaissance literature, 18th - Century art, moral education, and academic
freedom. Michael spent part of 2008 in London on a
fellowship at the Globe Theatre during its productions of
King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Michael coaches boys’ varsity squash and advises the
Sixth Form student speakers for church assemblies. He
lives on campus with his wife, Laureen, who is also a
member of the English Department, and their children,
Drake ‘11, Fletcher ‘13 and Sydell.
P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL