Gene Lees talks about his book

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Gene Lees discusses his passion for studying language

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Gene Lees discusses pricing for performances and albums

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Q: “You write as much about language as you do about people and how people use it. I know you have a great, abiding affection for words and how they work and rhyming dictionaries that maybe when you see columns about the use of language now, whether it’s because everybody’s so disturbed at how bad it is in general use that it seems people are starting to pay attention to language again…”

A: “Ain't nobody know what it does to songwriting because of the terrible grip of the major record companies on the distribution of music. But I don't know that there's a renewed interest in language or not. I've been reading a book recently called 'The State of the Language', which is a bunch of essays by academics on the English language. And I am astonished reading it how little they actually know about the English language. For example, there is a long and tedious chapter on the correct use of shall and will by an English professor in England. Nowhere in there does he recognize simple fact about the English language, which very few people do, mind you, but if he's going to talk about it so readily about shall and will he ought to know this.”

“English is the only language I know that has no future tense. That startles people when you say that, but we can only imply intent towards the future with shall or will, which is the volition of a future or the tendency, or then we can use that construction 'going to'. But we must use auxiliary verbs. We have a definite past tense, like we say marched with an -ed, but we have no future tense as French does, Spanish does as every language I know has.”

“And English is a very odd language and here, we have this academic writing learnedly about shall and will and he displays the most rudimentary ignorance of the defectiveness of English verbs. We don't even have a pluperfect, a proper one. We don't have such a thing. We have an awkward way of doing it. But the French have a tense called the future past, which is putting the mind into the future and looking back on an action that will have been past tense by then. That's an absolutely, definite French verb. We've lost our subjunctive in English. We've lost a lot of subtlety in this. But some of the academic writings I read on language really bother me because they're not very good.”