Class 7 English Chapter 6: Say the Right Thing

A play, and a mother with a plan

Two women are coming to tea. Mrs Shaw has met one of them in a shop and asked her to visit. She wants the visit to go well, and she has a reason that she states plainly: she would like to be invited back.

Lanfield, and what Mrs Shaw wants from it

The Shaws live in Lanfield, where there is not much to do. Mrs Shaw wants more friends. Mrs Harding is the wife of a wealthy man who has just bought a large house nearby. The visit is a small social opportunity and the mother knows it.

Who the four characters are

Mary is a young girl. Mrs Shaw is her mother. Mrs Harding is the guest. Mrs Lee is Mr Harding’s sister, staying with the family for a while. That last connection looks like a detail. It is the engine of the second scene.

The coat, in the first line

The play opens on an instruction. Put the coat away; this room is not the place for it. Mary answers that she is always being told to put things away, and that she is not a child. Nothing is explained to us, and nothing needs to be. We have met both of them in four lines.

Can Mary talk?

Mary says she can talk, and has been able to for a long time. Her mother agrees, and adds that she talks too much, and wonders whether anybody wants to hear it. The reply is affectionate and it is also a warning.

The offer, and the reluctant yes

Mary asks to stay for the visit. Her mother suggests a walk instead, because she may not say the right thing. Mary insists that she knows what to say and can prove it. Mrs Shaw agrees, with a condition: take care.

The first rule: be kind

Her mother will not supply a script. What she supplies is a principle. Be kind to people and you will not go far wrong. Say things that will please them. Laugh, and try to make them laugh as well.

The second rule: fill a silence

If the talk stops, start it again. Guests do not want to sit in a room and look at the floor. Think of something to say. This is the one rule Mary obeys most energetically, and obeying it is what ruins the afternoon.

The third rule: do not look glad

When the guests prepare to leave, do not leap out of the chair and look happily towards the door. Look sorry instead. The instruction is about hiding a true feeling, which is a harder thing than being kind.

The fourth rule: ask them to stay

Say something like: must you go, can’t you stay? Mary likes this one. It has actual words in it, and she repeats them twice over, aloud, to show that she has them.

Four rules, one idea

Please people, keep the talk alive, conceal your relief, invite them to linger. All four ask for the same thing, which is attention to somebody other than yourself. Courtesy is not a set of phrases. It is other people, thought about in advance.

What Mary takes away

She takes the words. The leaving formula goes in perfectly, and the principle behind it does not go in at all. She has not asked why a host says it, so she has no way of telling a right occasion from a wrong one.

Her last line of the scene

She says she will remember, and that she has often done harder things than this. It is a confident ending, and the confidence is the point. A character who doubted herself would not be funny.

Why we can see the disaster coming

Because we have the rules and she only has the words. That gap between what the audience knows and what the character knows is called dramatic irony, and it is the oldest comic machine there is.

A scene that has to be long

Nothing has happened yet, and that is correct. A setup must be complete before a mistake can register as a mistake. Every rule stated here is one Mary will break, and a rule we had not heard would simply pass us by.

What to watch for next

Two things. The small stage directions, where nobody speaks or one guest looks at another, since those carry the timing. And the shape of each blunder, which turns out to be the same shape five times over.

Scenario:

A school asks three pupils to welcome a visiting speaker. Each is given the same sentence to say: we are very glad you could come to us today. Asha learns it and also asks her teacher why a host says such a thing. Bhavin learns it as a sound and says it twice in the mirror. Chetan writes it on his hand. On the day the speaker arrives an hour late and looks harassed. Asha says she is glad he reached them safely and offers him a chair. Bhavin delivers the sentence word perfect, including very glad you could come today, to a man who is plainly wishing he had not. Chetan reads his hand and says it to the driver.

Analysis:

All three learnt the same sentence and only one of them learnt what it was for. Asha asked the question behind the words, so she had a principle rather than a line, and when the occasion changed she could change with it. Her sentence was different from the one she was given and it did the same job better. Bhavin had the words exactly and nothing else, so he could not tell a suitable moment from an unsuitable one. Chetan had less than Bhavin, since his note told him what to say and not who to say it to. This is Mary’s situation precisely. She has must you go, can’t you stay, perfectly memorised, and she has never asked why a host says it. At the one moment it is needed she produces the right shape with the parts in the wrong order. A formula learnt by sound survives only while nothing unexpected happens, and something unexpected always happens.

Activity:

Take a courtesy you use without thinking, such as the thing you say when leaving a friend’s house. Write down what it is for, in your own words. Then write a different sentence that does the same job, and decide which of the two you would use with a stranger.

Title:

Tick the rules off as they break

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

The rule about keeping the talk going collects the most marks, and it is the one she is trying hardest to obey. That is the whole joke of the play in one column of a notebook: the harm comes from obedience to the letter of an instruction whose purpose was never understood.

The pre-reading page quotes Atithi Devo Bhava, the idea that a guest is to be treated as a god. The play is a comedy, but the courtesy it is about is taken seriously in a great many cultures.

A play gives a writer no narrator. Everything a reader learns has to arrive through speech or through a stage direction, which is why those directions matter so much more here than in a story.

The playwright gives Mrs Lee the smallest part and the most useful one. She is related to almost everybody Mary insults, and that is a choice made before a word of Scene II was written.

The four pieces of advice — Please them, fill the gap, look sorry, ask them to stay — Four instructions in the order Mrs Shaw gives them. Each is small, and all four are the same idea applied at a different moment of the visit.

What dramatic irony needs — We know, she does not — Two conditions: the audience has information, and the character lacks it. Scene I supplies the first and Mary’s confidence guarantees the second.

The guests arrive, and the talk starts well

Mrs Harding says she likes Lanfield, though it is not London, and that they have found a good house. Then the conversation stops. Mrs Shaw looks at her daughter, which is an invitation, and Mary accepts it.

Blunder one: the children

She admires Mrs Harding’s beautiful children and says she has often seen them on the road. Mrs Harding has no children. Mary then argues the point, insisting she has seen a little boy and a little girl, which makes the first mistake twice as bad as it needed to be.

The rescue, and what it tells us

Her mother says quietly that they must be somebody else’s children, and immediately offers a new subject: Mr Best, a nice man who lives nearby. That rescue is the first half of a pattern we are going to see six more times.

Blunder two: the banker

Mary takes the new topic and demolishes it. Mr Best travels to London and back every day and reads two newspapers on the train. She asks what kind of life that is, and adds that bankers cannot think. Mrs Lee replies that her brother is a banker who does precisely that.

Blunder three: the blue dress

A new subject, Mrs Best, and Mary laughs at her clothes: a blue dress worn with a red coat over it. Mrs Harding says mildly that she has a blue dress and often wears her red coat with it.

Blunder four: the lady who stays in bed

Mary cannot understand women who stay in bed all morning, nor why anybody needs to send for a doctor. She has never been to one. Mrs Harding stays in bed in the mornings. Mrs Lee often goes to the doctor. Two guests, one remark.

Blunder five: the talkative friend

Mrs Shaw offers one of her best friends, Mrs Grantley. Mary objects that she is too talkative, and that talkative women are not interesting. Mrs Lee answers that her own mother is a very talkative woman.

Blunder six: the dirty dog

Now Mary is looking out of the window, and the subject is her own. A dog is always near their house and it always looks dirty. Why keep dogs? Mrs Harding looks out of the same window and identifies him. It is their dog, and his name is Towzer. This is the one where Mary blushes.

Blunder seven: the man on the horse

Still at the window, she sees Mr Pomeroy riding, and asks why some men prefer horses to people. Mrs Lee explains that her brother rides whenever he can, practises shooting, and sold a house in London so that he could.

Seven blunders, one shape

Topic, criticism, connection, apology, silence. Every one of the seven runs through those five steps. The material changes and the machine does not, and once a reader sees it the scene stops being a list of embarrassments and becomes a single piece of engineering.

Why the guests never shout

Not one of them raises her voice. Each states the connection in a short sentence and stops. That restraint is good manners, and it is also better comedy, because a protest would fill the silence that the playwright wants to leave empty.

The silences are written down

Nobody speaks. The note appears again and again, and it is not padding. It measures the damage each time, and it gives the audience the pause in which to understand what has just happened.

How the blunders escalate

The early ones are about strangers. The later ones reach the guests themselves, their clothes, their habits, and finally their dog. The last two are not even guesses, since Mary is describing what she can see out of the window while its owner sits behind her.

The guests decide to leave

Mrs Harding looks at Mrs Lee and says it is getting late. Mrs Lee agrees. Both of them look at Mary, which is the playwright telling us who is being blamed. Mrs Shaw does the correct thing and asks them to stay a little longer.

The last line

Then Mary says it. She had rehearsed one sentence, twice over, and she delivers both halves with their jobs exchanged, so that the words invite the guests to go. The sentence is grammatical, polite in shape, and exactly backwards.

Why that is the right ending

Because it is the failure Scene I promised. She had the words and not the reason, so she had nothing to tell her which half belonged where. The play ends on the one line she was sure of, which is the cruellest and funniest place it could have stopped.

Scenario:

A class group chat is set up for a project. Ravi does not know who is in it. He sends a message complaining about the boy who always finishes the chalk, then one about a teacher who sets too much homework, then one about a girl who talks through assembly. Each time somebody answers in a single line: that is my cousin, that is my mother, that is me. After the third reply Ravi writes a long apology. Nobody responds to it. The next day he asks a friend why the chat went quiet, and the friend says the problem was never the three people. It was that Ravi criticised three people he could not see and never once asked who was listening.

Analysis:

The friend is right, and the diagnosis is exactly the one this play invites. Ravi did not do three separate wrong things. He did one wrong thing three times, which was to speak about absent people to an audience he had not identified. That is Mary’s error with the serial numbers filed off. In the play the audience is two women, one of whom is related to half the neighbourhood; in the chat it is a list of names nobody read. Either way the criticism of a person who is not present carries a risk you cannot calculate, because the information you would need is exactly the information you do not have. The remedy is not silence. It is to notice that a remark about somebody absent is a bet, and to decide whether you would be happy for that person to read it. Note also what the single-line replies achieve in both cases. Nobody shouts. The connection is stated and the speaker is left to work out the rest, which is far more effective than an argument.

Activity:

Think of a remark you have heard made about somebody who was not there. Write down what the speaker was risking, and what information would have been needed to know the risk. Then write the one-line reply that would have made the point most quietly.

Title:

Find the shape in all seven

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

The apology column empties out as the scene goes on, which is the escalation visible as a gap in a table. The eighth row refuses to fit at all, because the last mistake is not about a hidden connection: it is a misunderstanding of a sentence Mary had already learnt, and that is why it makes a better ending than an eighth blunder would have done.

Mary apologises three separate times in the scene, and each apology is shorter than the last. By the end she manages only a few words and a red face.

Mrs Shaw never scolds her daughter in front of the guests. She changes the subject instead, every single time, which is the behaviour of somebody still trying to save the afternoon.

The last blunder is not a guess at all. Mary is looking out of the window at a man on a horse, and the horse and the man both belong to the story Mrs Lee is about to tell.

The five steps of every blunder — Topic, criticism, connection, apology, silence — Learn the sequence once and all seven blunders become one thing. Then the only question about a new one is what the criticism was and who turned out to be related.

Who is connected to whom — Mrs Lee is related to nearly everybody — Her brother is the banker who rides and shoots. Her mother is the talkative woman. Her sister-in-law owns the dress, the dog and the morning in bed.

Four words from the play

Humorous, hilariously, coming, beautiful. Each is built on a shorter word: humour, hilarious, come, beauty. The extra piece at the end has a name. It is a suffix.

What a suffix is

An ending added to a root word. The root carries the meaning and the suffix usually decides the word’s job in a sentence. Nothing is taken away from the meaning; something is added to the grammar.

Changing the job

Quiet is an adjective and quietly is an adverb. Tolerate is a verb and tolerance is a noun. Courage is a noun and courageous is an adjective. Three pairs, three changes of job, and in each case the idea stays where it was.

The three commonest job-changers

Use -ly to make an adverb, as in gladly and quietly. Use -ous to make an adjective, as in courageous and humorous. Use -ance to make a noun, as in guidance and tolerance. Those three will carry a great deal of ordinary writing.

Suffixes that carry a meaning

Two work differently. The ending -logy means a study of something, which is why biology and sociology are what they are. The ending -ward gives a direction: backward, homeward, upward.

Suffixes that change only a form

Three more change a form rather than a job. The -ed of stopped makes a past tense. The -est of toughest makes a superlative. The -es of tomatoes makes a plural. The word remains the same kind of word.

Splitting a word to spell it

Banker is bank plus -er. Walking is walk plus -ing. Gladly is glad plus -ly. Seeing the join is useful, because most spelling mistakes in long words happen exactly at it.

The first spelling adjustment

When the root ends in a silent e, that e usually goes before a suffix beginning with a vowel. Come gives coming, not comeing. Guide gives guidance. Write gives writing.

The second spelling adjustment

When the root ends in y, the y usually changes to i. Beauty gives beautiful. Happy gives happiest. Easy gives easily. The y survives before -ing, which is why trying keeps it.

Stacking one ending on another

Endings can be built up. Hope gives hopeful, hopeful gives hopefully, and hopefully gives hopefulness. Three suffixes on one small root, and each step changes the job again: adjective, then adverb, then noun. Reading a long word from the left tells you what it is about; reading the endings from the right tells you what it can do.

Choosing a suffix for a sentence

If you need an adverb, reach for -ly: speak effectively, choose wisely. If you need an adjective, -ful or -ous will often do: respectful, responsive, humorous. If you need a noun, try -ance or -ation: guidance, appreciation.

Now the other kind of ending

The same chapter teaches an ending that belongs to a verb. Mrs Shaw says that Mrs Lee has been staying with the family for a while. That is not a simple past, and it is not quite a present either.

What the simple past does

The Hardings lived in London until last year. Mrs Shaw met her guest in a shop. Both are finished, and both sit entirely in the past. The simple past closes the door behind the action.

What has been -ing does instead

Has or have, then been, then a verb in -ing. She has been staying with the Hardings for a fortnight. The staying began earlier and it has not stopped, so the sentence reaches from the past into the present moment.

Its second use: a visible result

Somebody has been polishing that floor since breakfast, and it shows. Here the activity may have just finished, but its result is in front of us. The focus is on the activity rather than on its completion.

Telling the three tenses apart

They lived in London. That is over. She is staying with the Hardings. That is now, and says nothing about how long. She has been staying with the Hardings for a fortnight. That is now, and tells you it has lasted.

A warning about the helpers

The -ing form by itself tells you almost nothing. It appears in is staying, in was staying and in has been staying, and the three mean quite different things. What decides the tense is the words in front of the ending, so those are what a reader should look at first.

Why the two halves of this topic belong together

Both are about endings. A suffix changes what job a word can do in a sentence. The -ing ending, given two helpers, changes where in time the verb sits. A great deal of English grammar is decided at the right-hand end of a word.

Scenario:

A school library puts up a notice: the reading room was closed for repairs. Pupils stop coming. Three weeks later the librarian finds the room empty although the repairs finished a fortnight ago. She asks a teacher to look at her notice. The teacher says the words are all correct and the tense is wrong. She suggests two rewrites and asks the librarian to choose. The first reads: the reading room is being repaired. The second reads: the reading room has been repaired and is open. The librarian puts up the second, and the room fills by the afternoon.

Analysis:

Nothing was misspelt and nothing was ungrammatical. The fault was in which tense the notice chose, and the cost was three weeks of an empty room. Was closed is a simple past, and a simple past closes the door behind the action without saying what the situation is now. A pupil reading it learns only that at some moment the room was shut. Is being repaired would have been accurate while the work was going on, since it describes an activity in progress. Has been repaired and is open does the job the librarian actually needed: it reports a finished activity whose result is present and visible, which is exactly what the perfect is for. The general lesson is worth more than the notice. A tense is not decoration on a verb. It tells the reader where in time to stand, and a reader who is put in the wrong place will act on it.

Activity:

Find a notice in your school or neighbourhood that uses a past tense. Decide whether the reader needs to know about the present as well, and if so rewrite it. Then write one sentence explaining what your rewrite tells the reader that the original did not.

Title:

Split, label and spell

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Almost every spelling change happens at the join, and nearly all of them are one of the two rules: a silent e dropped or a y turned into an i. Once the join is visible, the long word stops being one hard thing to remember and becomes two easy ones.

A prefix goes at the front and a suffix at the end. English has far more suffixes than prefixes, which is why so much of its grammar lives at the right-hand end of a word.

The -ance in guidance and the -ence in difference do the same job. English kept both spellings because the words arrived from Latin at different times and by different routes.

Present perfect continuous is three words long in English and a single verb form in many other languages. The helpers are doing work that an ending does elsewhere.

What a suffix does — The root carries the meaning, the ending gives it a job — Quiet and quietly mean the same thing. What changes is where in a sentence the word is allowed to stand, and that is the suffix’s work.

Building the present perfect continuous — Has or have, been, and an -ing — Three slots in a fixed order. Leave out been and you have the present continuous instead, which says nothing about how long it has been going on.

A chapter about choosing words

The play turns on a girl who chose defensible words at indefensible moments. So it is fitting that the language work in this chapter is about choice: which of two near-synonyms, which punctuation mark, which word the voice leans on.

Say and tell

Say attends to the message. Tell attends to the person receiving it. She said nothing is good English with no listener in sight. She told her mother needs the mother. That is the whole distinction.

Why say me is wrong

Because tell is the verb that takes a person as its object. Tell me, tell her, tell the class. If there is nobody to receive the words, the verb you want is say, and the test takes about a second.

Fetch and bring

These differ by direction. To fetch is to go somewhere, collect a thing and return with it. To bring is to carry something with you as you come. Fetch her from the station and then bring her home.

See and look

See is what reaches your eyes whether you are attending or not. Look is aiming them deliberately. So you can look at a photograph and still not see anybody you recognise, which sounds odd until you notice that both verbs are doing their proper work.

Hear and listen

The same distinction again. You hear the music from next door without choosing to. You listen to it if you want the words. Hearing happens to you; listening is something you do.

A pattern worth naming

Four of these pairs make one distinction: what happens to you against what you do on purpose. See and look, hear and listen are the clearest. Once a reader sees the pattern, three of the pairs stop needing to be memorised separately.

Live and stay

These divide by length rather than by intention. Live names a permanent home: I live in a small town. Stay names a temporary presence: I stay with my relatives in the city. Mrs Lee is staying with the Hardings, which is why that verb is the right one.

Study and learn

Study is the time spent, usually as part of formal education. Learn is the knowledge or skill arrived at, however it arrived. You study for an examination and you learn new ideas along the way, and the second can happen without the first.

Speak and talk

Speak is expressing thoughts aloud, often in a formal setting. Talk is informal conversation with somebody. You speak to an assembly and you talk to a friend, and a visitor who is going to speak about gardening is being announced rather than chatted with.

Now the kinds of sentence

Every sentence does one of four jobs, and three of the four take their own punctuation mark. The play supplies an example of each, which is convenient, because it means the terms can be learnt on sentences already familiar.

Declarative and interrogative

The room looks cleaner now. That states something, so it is a declarative and takes a full stop. Why are those two women coming here? That asks, so it is an interrogative and takes a question mark.

Exclamatory and imperative

What beautiful children you have! Strong feeling, so an exclamatory, and the exclamation mark follows. Put that coat away. An order or a request, so an imperative, and that one takes a full stop.

The mark people get wrong

The imperative. Because it is forceful, writers reach for an exclamation mark, but a plain instruction takes a full stop. Tidy the shelves before you leave is an imperative and needs nothing more.

Sentence stress

English leans on some words and skates over others. Content words, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, usually take the stress; function words, such as is and in, usually do not. A declarative sentence also falls in pitch towards its end.

One sentence, five meanings

Take a five-word sentence and stress each word in turn. Stress the first word and you suggest that somebody else might have. Stress the second and you deny it flatly. Stress the last and you limit the claim to today. The words never change.

Reading a sentence the writer did not mean

Which is why a notice can be read out correctly and still mislead. The reader chooses a stress whether or not they intend to, so the choice is better made on purpose. Ask what the sentence is being set against, and lean on the word that marks it.

What stress is not

It is not loudness. A stressed word is given emphasis and a little extra length, which is why shouting does not make a sentence clearer. It is also why the same sentence can be read aloud wrongly, with the emphasis on a word that was never the point.

Scenario:

A school assembly notice is handed to two pupils to read aloud. It says that the library will not be open on Monday. Priya reads it with the emphasis on Monday, and the hall hears that the library is shut on one particular day. Vikram reads the same words with the emphasis on open, and several pupils go away believing the library has closed down. A teacher asks both of them to read it again. The notice is unchanged, the words are identical, and the two readings have given the school two different pieces of information.

Analysis:

Nothing was misread in the ordinary sense. Both pupils pronounced every word correctly and neither added or dropped anything. What differed was the stress, and stress is not decoration. Leaning on Monday sets that day against the other days, which is the contrast the notice intended. Leaning on open sets being open against not being open at all, which turns a one-day closure into a permanent one. This is the same lesson the play teaches in a larger way. Mary’s words were defensible and her delivery of them was not, because she never considered what each remark would set against what. A speaker chooses the stress whether or not they mean to, so the choice is better made deliberately. The practical test is to ask what the sentence is being contrasted with, and then to lean on the word that marks the contrast.

Activity:

Take a one-sentence notice from your school. Read it aloud three times, stressing a different word each time, and write down what each reading tells a listener. Then decide which reading the writer would have wanted.

Title:

Sort the pairs, then punctuate the play

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Four of the seven pairs turn out to make the same distinction, so the column sorts itself into one large group and three odd ones. And nearly every disagreement in the punctuating half is about an imperative, because a sentence that feels forceful seems to call for an exclamation mark even when it is simply an instruction.

Many languages use one verb where English uses say and tell. The split is not a logical necessity; it is a feature of English that has to be learnt rather than reasoned out.

An imperative usually has no visible subject. In put that coat away, the person addressed is understood, which is why the sentence can begin with its verb.

Stress does not mean volume. A stressed word is given more emphasis and a little more length, not more loudness, which is why shouting a sentence does not make its meaning clearer.

Say or tell — Tell needs a person, say does not — Tell me, tell her, tell the class. If there is nobody to receive it, the verb you want is say. The test takes a second and settles almost every case.

The intention pairs — The second word is the deliberate one — Hear and listen, see and look. The first happens to you and the second you choose to do. Study and learn work the same way round in terms of effort.