We have an English for the world and a mother tongue for home. What we lack is a language for arguing with each other.
At a morning market in Kuala Lumpur, two people are arguing. One says the fish is not fresh. The other says it was fresh this morning and the ice has melted because the drain is blocked. A third says the drain has been blocked for three weeks and someone was paid to fix it.
Notice what your mind did with the word arguing. It probably reached for quarrel. But nothing in that scene is a quarrel. Three people are establishing facts, assigning responsibility, and asking what should be done. That is argument in its older, larger sense—the sense that built parliaments and won independence. We have mostly lost the word for it, and losing the word has made the activity harder to do.
Latin arguere carried both senses from the beginning: to make clear, prove, demonstrate—and to accuse, blame. English inherited both. For centuries, argue comfortably held "to make a case" and "to quarrel" in the same word. But the two senses have since split along a fault line. The demonstrative sense—argue that, argue for, a strong argument, arguably—has retreated into courtrooms, journals, and academic prose. In ordinary speech, the bare intransitive owns the field: they're arguing means they're fighting. The proving sense has become formal. The accusing sense has become the default.
Linguists call this pejorative narrowing: a word's range shrinks toward its harsher sense, and the neutral or productive senses are pushed into marked registers. It is not corruption; nobody did it on purpose. It is a drift, and it is common. But it is consequential, because it has happened across the entire vocabulary of public reasoning.
Debate has been colonised by the televised scoring match. Criticise has narrowed toward "find fault" rather than "evaluate." Confront has drifted from "face squarely" to "attack." Contentious once meant "causing discussion"; it now mostly means "causing trouble." In each case, a word with a legitimate deliberative sense has been pulled toward its adversarial shadow, and the deliberative sense has gone into retreat.
The consequence is a genuine lexical gap. English now lacks a neutral everyday verb for making a case to someone who disagrees, in good faith, with reasons. Argue is too combative. Debate sounds like a game show. Discuss implies no disagreement at all. Contend is legal-archaic. Make the case is a phrase, not a verb. This is not a trivial loss. If you have no ordinary word for an activity, the activity becomes harder to invoke casually—and what cannot be named casually is harder to do casually. Civic argument gets coded as something professionals do in formal settings, or something rude people do at dinner. The shame attaches to the word before it attaches to the act.
The same erasure happens at the level of grammar. Nominalisation turns verbs into nouns: decide becomes decision, implement becomes implementation, engage becomes engagement. "The contractor stopped work in March" becomes "a temporary suspension of works occurred." Same facts—but the actor has evaporated, and the tense has blurred. Nobody did anything. A situation obtained. The first sentence tells you who to ask. The second does not. It does the same damage to work itself: we rarely say we are working; we say we are going to work, and once work becomes a place it can be measured by attendance instead of output. Nouns swallow verbs, and the verb was where the agency lived.
This is what I mean by the missing middle. It is not "fancy English." It is the register that sits between the technical-defensive prose of institutions and the casual-commercial prose of the feed. The first says leave it to the professionals. The second says express yourself, buy this, share this. Neither says we must decide and act together. The middle argues—in the old sense. It names actors. It uses verbs. It treats strangers as people capable of disagreement and action.
Across the first independent nations emerging from colonial rule, writers in the 17th and 18th centuries drew on literary traditions and forms of English that now seem archaic and have largely fallen out of use. These discrepancies, in contrast with the popular English of today, are an enduring measure of their significance . They drew on the language of ordinary people, yet carried the clarity and force of a political argument. Grounded in consent rather than mere precedent or “just how things were”.
Here the imported complaint needs correcting. English did not arrive in Malaya as a language of the kampung or the surau. It arrived as the language of the Straits Settlements, the colonial civil service, the tin ledger and the rubber estate. It was instrumental from the start—a language for dealing with the world, not for hashing things out with the neighbours. So the Paine middle was never fully ours to lose. We inherited the instrument, not the civic tradition that once carried it. English here became the language of the pitch, the tender, the audit, the email to the client in Singapore or Dubai. Those uses reward precision, but they also reward defensibility—and defensibility breeds the abstraction that makes civic argument feel foreign.Meanwhile the sensory, the concrete, the tangible and the communal live comfortably in Bahasa Malaysia, in our dialects, in the registers we speak at the mamak. That is not a failure. It is history. But it leaves public problems split in two: in English, an issue becomes a "stakeholder concern"; in the vernacular, it stays vivid but local. What goes missing is the bridge.
And the commercial cost is real. A firm that imports templates without examining them—the slide deck, the hedge-language, the borrowed framework—is doing in business what colonial administration did in government: importing authority instead of reasoning from local conditions. Malaysian firms competing across the region do not win by sounding like everyone else's consultants. They win by knowing their own market well enough to say something concrete about it. Self-determination in commerce is not a slogan. It is the habit of naming your own situation in your own verbs.
None of this calls for a return to eighteenth-century English, which was coherent partly because it was exclusive—built for a literate, propertied, largely male public with shared biblical and classical references. Malaysia does not need archaism. It needs function.
So what would a usable middle look like here? It would borrow from the market, not the memo. Short declaratives. Named actors. Concrete nouns. Verbs doing the work of verbs. But the heart of it is simpler than that, and harder: the willingness to ask plain questions without shame.
Who decided this? On what authority? What did it cost, and who paid? Why is the drain still blocked three months after the contractor was paid? These are not sophisticated questions. That is the point. They are the questions a person asks at a market stall, and they are the questions that institutional prose is built to absorb without answering. Every hedge, every nominalisation, every "temporary suspension of works" is a small machine for making those questions feel naive. The shame of asking them is the most effective censorship we have, and nobody had to impose it.
Plain questions, though, do not guarantee plain answers. Some problems really are complicated, and a society that mistakes plain speech for simple solutions will hand itself to whoever sounds most certain. The discipline is to keep the question plain and let the answer be as complicated as it honestly is—and to tell the difference between complexity that names an actor and complexity that hides one. Epidemiology is complicated and honest. "Holistic stakeholder engagement" is complicated and evasive. The test is whether you can still ask who.
This is a craft problem and an incentive problem, and both are fixable. Schools can teach argument—in the old sense—and cadence, not only format. Institutions can reward prose that names things. Employers can ask what was done, not who was seen doing it. Writers can refuse the reflex to abstract when abstraction buys nothing but safety. And we can take the word back. Argue is not a synonym for fight. It never was. It meant to make a case, to prove, to show why—and it still can, if enough people use it that way.
It requires remembering the woman at the market. She has a problem, she has named it, and she has asked who should fix it, and she was not embarrassed to ask. She was arguing—not fighting, arguing—and somewhere between her sentence and the slide deck, English forgot the difference. The work is to get it back. Not as heritage, but as infrastructure for a society that still has to decide things together.
Dr Kavesh (kaveshdr@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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