If you’re considering a career in poetry, one of the first questions you need to ask yourself, other than “Am I happy to die in prison?”, is which language you’re going to pen your odes in. The sensible answer, of course, would be English. Sure, French has a certain romance, mainly because it’s recited by French people, who could read the cooking instructions off a packet of boil-in-the-bag meatballs and make it sound sexy, but that gloss only applies up to the point where you understand what they’re saying. Delve a little deeper and it usually turns out to be some miserable moral tale about failed social climbers and Corsicans being eaten by dogs.
You could plump for Japanese if you like to keep your poetry brief and seasonal, but English offers something to the poet that no other language can provide: for every word there is an alternative word.
Now there will be those among you who pounce on this assertion and tear it apart with challenging questions like, “What’s another word for Wednesday then?” but that would be missing the point. The point is this: the word is ‘alternative’. Not ‘alternate’.
There is a trend for using shorter versions of words of the same (or virtually the same) meaning: ironic rather than ironical; comic rather than comical. This is all well and good in most cases, but don’t come at me with your alternates when you mean alternative. Alternate is not a shorter alternative to alternative. It means something completely different.
For example, the other day I read this: “We represent an alternate way of thinking.” Alternate means switching one then the other in turns, like the leaves on an elm tree. “We meet on alternate Fridays.” A car indicator has an alternate way of winking. But unless you have a mental condition that makes you change your mind every time you formulate an opinion (aka a political agenda), you can’t have an alternate way of thinking. The word is alternative.
Alternative as in comedy. If Hale and Pace, say, had called themselves ‘alternate’ comedians, it would have implied that every other line was not funny. Of course, the ratio was much higher than that.
When Stiff Little Fingers sang about an Alternative Ulster, they were advocating an Ulster that was different to the one that existed at the time, not an Ulster that was only Ulster on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
‘Alter’ in Latin means ‘the other’ – no, not as in ‘a bit of the other’, although it would be interesting to know where that particular euphemism came from. If ‘the other’ was the alternative, what was the option being considered in the first place? Yoga? Knitting? Creosoting the fence? ‘Alter’ is the root of both alternate and alternative, but their different meanings were clearly defined as long ago as the 1500s. And if Anne Boleyn could get her head round it, surely we can.
But these days – these terrible, time-poor, social media short-cutting days – you’ll find the word ‘alternative’ being increasingly replaced by the non-synonym ‘alternate’. Why? Because it’s a little bit shorter. One syllable shorter, in fact, and if you add up all the time you save by short-cutting the extra syllable every time you want to say the word ‘alternative’, you could add a not insignificant 1 minute 13 seconds to the end of your life. Just enough time to wonder whether you might have been better off pursuing an alternative career as a poet.
The answer, by the way, is no. You wouldn’t. Now please use the time I’ve saved you to give full commitment to your alternatives.
