Essay : The Struggle to Learn English: Roger, Wilco (Got It, Will Do)

 

This happened about forty years ago.

I was at school in England. One day, a student a year above me saw me reading a newspaper in the classroom. Some time later, he came across me in the corridor and said, “Will you bring the newspaper of yours?” In other words, “Could you bring me the newspaper?”

Without giving it a second thought, I replied, “Roger, Wilco.”

I turned around to go back to the classroom and fetch the newspaper I had left there. But before I could take a single step, a Canadian teacher who happened to be nearby exclaimed, “What did you just say?!”

“Er… I said, ‘Roger, Wilco.’”

“What does that mean?!”

“It means more or less the same as ‘Aye aye, sir.’”

The Canadian teacher looked even more confused.

I explained, “If ‘Aye aye, sir’ is a naval expression, ‘Roger, Wilco’ is something you hear in aviation radio communications.”

The teacher did not seem convinced. Instead, he asked me, “Why does a Japanese girl like you know military terminology?”

I cannot remember exactly when I first came across the expression, but I do remember hearing it quite often in London back in 1980s — at markets, underground ticket offices, building sites, and from the builders who sometimes came to our house. It seemed to be used quite casually, with the simple sense of “Got it. Will do.”

“Roger” means “message received” or “understood”, while “Wilco” is short for “(I) will comply”, meaning that the speaker will follow the instruction. Put together, it amounts to something like, “Understood. I’ll do as you say.”

I could not understand why a Canadian teacher, who was a native English speaker, was asking me such questions. Nevertheless, I explained that I had heard the expression in various everyday situations.

The school I attended at the time was an American international school, but there were hardly any American or Canadian students in the subjects I had chosen. Even those who were there tended, for some reason, to be rather quiet. Perhaps that was simply the way they were.

In the end, the Canadian teacher could not hide his doubts about my use of “Roger, Wilco” in ordinary conversation. Apparently, he went around asking every Japanese student at the school, “Have you ever heard this expression?” It seems that he wanted to find out whether it was perhaps a phrase that Japanese people somehow knew.

I never found out whether any of the other Japanese students knew the expression.

The Canadian teacher was extremely sceptical whenever he encountered an English expression he had never heard before. He seemed convinced that I might have picked up some strange piece of slang.

I had assumed that, because he was a native English speaker, he would naturally know the expression. But in reality, an expression that I had heard regularly in London was completely unfamiliar to my Canadian teacher.

Before I came to Britain, I had thought of “English” as a single, universal language. Yet this small incident taught me that English, too, has its own regional cultures and histories, and that the English-speaking world cannot simply be treated as one homogeneous whole.

Sometimes, people who speak the same language can be even more surprised by differences in language than outsiders are. Ever since that experience, I have never been able to think of “English” as something that can simply be taken for granted as one single language.

Even now, whenever I think about English, I sometimes remember that Canadian teacher. Even among people who speak the same language, there are times when they look at each other in bewilderment.

Perhaps that is one of the things that makes language so fascinating.