James Bond 007 took me for a spin with his English!

My English is not so bad. How bad? Bad enough that I cannot avoid spotting what seems to be an egregious error in what James Bond says in Skyfall.

In that movie, Bond buys a drink for the villain’s moll – par for the course. What follows next is something I could hardly digest. He requests her to, “Bring me to him.” The “him” is the villain.

Does the sentence have any meaning? Don’t you bring someone far nearer? Should this not have been, “Take me to him”? Did the script writer screw up? Did Daniel Craig make a big boo-boo? Did the director choose not to re-shoot that particular three or four second segment, profit could take a hit?

Questions and more questions. I must thank my stars that I did not notice such an error in Spectre. On November 2, two days from today, I hope to see no such miscues when I will sit glued down in front of my TV at 8:45 PM to watch the latest offering (in India) from the Bond stable, No Time to Die.

In The Ten Commandments, Ramses II orders his general, once The Lord thy God of Moses parted the Red Sea and hadn’t yet closed it to, “Bring him [Moses] to me alive”. That was in 1956. Now it is the twenty first century. Did it matter? English is known/cursed for its plasticity. Did English change so much that word-order did not matter anymore–interchange “him” and “me” in the quoted line in Skyfall.

I tell you why this bothers me. When I watch a Hollywood movie, I keep a mental register of the turns of phrases native English speakers speak (thank their script writers!). While this may do not matter much in my facility with the language, at least I am aware. Now, Skyfall has taken me one step, at least, backwards.

All of this started when I submitted a guest column to the campus newspaper eons ago. In that, I used fully as the adverbial modifier for well. That was changed by the editor to full well. I knew I was grammatically correct.

So, I approached someone who was an English Litt graduate from University of Iowa and was doing further studies where I was doing my Ph.D. He was very clear on the issue: “You are right grammatically, but not in usage. It has been a while since fully lost the y.”   

If anyone could clarify what Bond said/should have said, I would be eternally thankful. I would not experience vertigo for being spun so hard.

Raghuram Ekambaram

P. S. If there are any errors of grammar, do not spin me hard; tell me softly and I would listen.