Laura Miller, Salon, October 25, 2009
“Passions run hot when the discussion turns to language,” writes Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch in his sprightly new history of the notion of “proper” English, “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.” {snip}
Lynch would like us all to calm down, please, and recognize that “proper” English is a recent and changeable institution. “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma” recapitulates the long argument between two schools of thought: the prescriptive—which holds that the job of language experts is to lay down the law by telling us how to speak and write—and the descriptive, which holds that compilers of dictionaries and other guides are in the business of describing, not dictating, how the language is used. The latter group includes most professional linguists and lexicographers, but the former—self-appointed pundits like the late William Safire and Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling rant about punctuation errors, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”—know that the real money lies in validating the ire of purists.
According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing—and, especially, the growth of general literacy—led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century. Scholars known collectively as “the 18th-century grammarians” have, in some accounts of the language’s history, been set up as “dastardly, moustache-twirling villains and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons,” who attempted to impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions on English grammar. Their most notorious crime was the prohibition against split infinitives.
Lynch takes a more temperate view of these “bad guys,” as he does of most matters discussed in “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.” While he leans decidedly toward the descriptivist camp, he believes experts ought to acknowledge the public’s need for guidance on how to speak and write standard English—that is, the lingua franca of official, public and commercial life in the English-speaking world.
{snip}
Lynch does think that English speakers should be taught to avoid splitting infinitives in certain situations, not because splitting them is incorrect, but because other people, people in a position to judge and exclude, have been taught it’s incorrect. The ability to speak and write standard English gives students “access to power,” he writes. It’s a membership card required for participation in the culture’s important conversations. But that doesn’t mean that standard English is necessarily superior to, say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE or, to use a more notorious moniker, Ebonics), or that deviations from it constitute the downfall of civilization as we know it, as popular curmudgeons of Safire’s ilk like to proclaim.
“Correct” English, as Lynch characterizes it, is basically “the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.” And sure enough, the first guides to English usage promised to teach people to write and speak with greater “elegance” and “politeness,” not greater correctness. These manuals, born of an age of increased social mobility, were intended for “a newly self-conscious group of people who were no longer peasants but still were excluded from the traditional aristocracy.” The suddenly rich children of merchants and manufacturers needed instructions on the elegant grammar (and manners) of the aristocracy in order to blend in with their social superiors. Tellingly, the 300-year history of fulmination against improper usage is marked by diatribes against those “inferior” and upstart groups supposedly most prone to transgression: women, young people, racial and ethnic minorities and, of course, Americans.
To protests that the language police are only protecting the accuracy, precision and clarity of our tongue, Lynch lifts a skeptical eyebrow. {snip} The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today’s usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on October 26, 2009)
Comments
“the 300-year history of fulmination against improper usage is marked by diatribes against those “inferior” and upstart groups supposedly most prone to transgression: women,….”
Just more divide and rule strategy!
This is the difference between an homogeneous society and a diverse society. In an homogeneous society, nearly everyone has the same culture, language, religion, etc. Thus there is very little conflict. In a non-homogeneous (diverse) society, each group has a different idea, causing constant conflict, reducing overall productivity and efficiency. In the least this leads to lowered quality of live and standard of living. In the extreme, it leads to warfare and genocide. In fact, virtually all wars are the result of diversity in one way or another — ethnic, racial, language, religion, political, etc.
The surest way to foment internal conflict is to force divergent groups of people to live together in the same place. We’ve seen this with Jews & Germans in WWII, With Muslims & Serbs, with Turks & Greeks on Crete, with Tamils and non-Tamils in Sri Lanka, and with Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. It is a Law of Human Behavior.
George Orwell knew this methodology very well: in order to debase a people, you must first debase their language.
So William James could just as easily have written Principles of Psychology in Ebonics? Or how about the Federalist Papers? So let me get this straight: Ebonics is just as clear and precise as “standard English”, and the only reason to prefer one to the other is social advancement? The logic is impeccable …
I seek to boldly go where grammar is taken seriously. Wait, I mean, well…you know.
I agree with Lynch that the english language is descriptive and fluid, not rigid and rule oriented. Most black people are too dim to understand the difference and that is why they fail.
Someone should send him a copy of Hamlet in Ebonics
Cyprus has problems with Greeks and Turks not crete.
This so-called “AAVE or ebonics” is nothing more than the language of evolutionary sluggishness and intellectual laziness! There is nothing remotely creative or clever about any of it. If ignorance had a voice, this would be its means of speech.
Of course academics must and do make endless excuses for this shameful illiteracy. Just as they have labored ceaselessly to explain away the obvious differences between races in intellectual capacity in the first place. They dutifully excuse black mumbo-jumbo as some kind of legitimate language, rather than simply admit that it is the sound of failure and inferiority.
I have some empathy for Lynch. He is just a White man trying to survive in a hostile environment, White male hating Rutgers. If the best you can do is teach English, you do, what you must do, to retain your position. For Lynch it’s probably Rutgers or a big box store.
It sounds to me as if some are trying to redefine intelligence, in order to conform to certain agendas.
Most people outside the US would regard Ebonics as a semi-literate and comical dialect, if they understood it at all.
I’m not a grammar Nazi, but I would hesitate to take anyone seriously who doesn’t have a reasonable grasp of good English usage - ‘youse’; ‘he done’; ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’; or the use of double negatives all set my teeth on edge and signal ‘uneducated’..
It’s a very simple matter of knowing how to speak your own language correctly. Even if you are a ‘woman’ like me) who doesn’t need a ‘status-protecting thump on the head’. I learned correct grammar and good English usage at school, at the same time as everyone else.
This illustrates why, in my opinion, we Anglophones suffer from lack of a Language Academy such as France has, which officially establishes rules and definititions and promotes correct usage and uniformity in language.
Traditionally, England has had a laissez-faire society (for the last four hundred years) in which everything from business to road building to city planning was left to haphazard private development — and language too — the result of England’s weakened monarchy and dispersed authority. And thus we have inherited the same. In France, with its highly centralized authority and tradition of royal absolutism, these things were controlled and planned. The results we see are the beautiful and orderly French cities for which France is famous, the formal French gardens (vs. the informal English garden), the heavy emphasis on formality and order and classisism (especially pre-Revolution). (A fine example of this French style being Washington DC.) When Frenchmen visit England, their horrified eyes see confusion, chaos and disorder — lack of any sensible planning! — whereas Englishmen proudly view their tangled cities as evidence of their individuality and free enterprise. Two different points of view!
So it is with our languages. The English language has developed over the centuries helter-skelter, with no guiding hand and no central authority. By now, it is so dispersed over the world that it would be hard to control it. But who is to tell us what is wrong or right?
Unfettered proliferation of dialects is no advantage. In some countries such as Germany or Italy, people can barely understand their countrymen who live twenty miles away, across the river or over a mountain. The multiplicity of dialects is no benefit to the country, but a serious problem. Its result is that children in school are required to learn standard German or Italian, such as that used on television, which can be understood commonly by everyone. Thus, they end up learning and using virtually two languages: the “proper” one when they read the newspaper or go to school or get a job; another when they go home, let their hair down and talk to their family or neighbors in local dialect.
This is true elsewhere also. In the Arabic world, educated people must learn standard Arabic, which may be completely different from the vernacular dialect in Morocco or Egypt. In China, they must learn Mandarin.
Frankly, I’m in favor of the French model. We need some sort of language academy to determine proper usage and establish what is correct and what is not. But with the multiplicity of English-speaking countries, I don’t see much prospect of getting it.
Ordinarily, in former times, we would have grown slowly apart until we were all speaking different languages, no longer mutually intelligible — just as modern English grew out of Old Saxon and Frisian and the Norse languages and separated itself from them.. But today, with electronic communications, mass media and entertainment, we are all singing the same songs, reading the same books, and watching the same movies. Thus, electronics and the modern media may be drawing us together and standardizing our language in a way that no academy could ever have the authority to do. In other words, the media have become “the Academy”.
I feel that regardless of how the English language is changing and forever adding new words and phrases, most of which are fleeting or slang, that the basics of good grammar will never go out of style. So, when I hear someone speak who was born in this country, and they can’t seem to put a coherent thought together correctly, it makes me think we had better correct this in our young people, before we lose the best of our language altogether. Perhaps we could start with getting rid of teachers who can barely speak our language.
Yep, it’s official. Since the self-destructive minority groups have embellished the “N” word and use it as a term of endearment, they make Whites actually laugh at how stupid they really are. Of course, I live in the Great Lakes region (or more derogatorily described as the “Rust Belt”. We call the undesirables “Canadians” or “Pirates” nowadays because what’s been happening in Somalia. If they can use code against Whitey, we can do the same. It’s a free country, right?
Someone should send him a copy of Hamlet in Ebonics
Well, there’s already an ebonics bible:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978915,00.html
I grew up in the North East, where many people use “you, people” the way a Southerner uses “you, all”, i.e., to indicate that he is using “you” in the plural rather than the singular. Many Blacks will have a fit if I use this around them. Yet these same Blacks will use the word “folks” which, when I was in school, was not even a correct English word (“folk”, like “people” is plural, or collective, in its basic meaning). If they do not want their English corrected, than they better not try to correct mine.
This is something stupid, based on a lack of experience with the problem. If you grade college papers in a mostly minority institution, you discover that it’s not that these diverse students have alternative grammars, which one could at least theoretically respect. It’s that they have no grammar at all, not writing in what could by any standard serve as coherent sentences.
I’ve tried sometimes to project portions of student essays on the screen and ask whether anyone, anyone at all in the room, could tell me what this sentence meant, or the next sentence, or the next; and the answer is always that no one can understand it all. And this is because it is gibberish.
I’ve had students complain that I was grading their English, and that I was supposed to only grade the content. What content? If the sentences don’t say anything, then there is no content.
I realized early on that just the fact that English is not someone’s primary language is not an indication that they would be able to write coherently in some other language, as though they were already well educated in that language before they took on the problem of simply expressing themselves now in English.
For example, a sentence should have something like a verb in it somewhere. Students shouldn’t just grab a word they heard somewhere they like like the sound of and use it to mean something it utterly does not.
I don’t care if someone puts a preposition on the end of a sentence, and I’m not sure I know what a split infinitive is. I do at least want a sentence to say SOMETHING, ANYTHING. An essay shouldn’t read like a monkey has just jumped on the keyboard.
I assume the writer of this article is someone terribly naive, who has no idea that they really don’t know what they’re talking about. I usually point out to my students that they themselves would not be willing to read anything that was written the way they’ve written their papers. Neither would the writer of this article. Yet it’s articles like this that delude the naive into thinking that grammar is dispensable, just some pretentious class arrogance, ethnocentrism or racism! Such idiots should be locked up somewhere and made to read nothing but things written by people utterly ignorant and contemptuous of grammar, and then required to take it all seriously, under threat of charges of racism if they don’t understand it all perfectly, don’t get it.
When whites use poor gramar they are often described as talking like hicks or hillbillies. When blacks speak poorly it is called ebonics. Ebonics in my opinion is worse than poor grammar its a slight step above baby talk.
Since blacks and hispanics can’t speak proper English, neither should whites.
Since blacks and hispanics can’t pass college entrance/ bar/ promotional exams, these tests should be dumbed down or abolished.
I fear for the future of this country.
“Correct” English, as Lynch characterizes it, is basically “the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.” And sure enough, the first guides to English usage promised to teach people to write and speak with greater “elegance” and “politeness,” not greater correctness.
The “King’s English” was the language of the court, and I tend to sympathize with it - not out of any class snobbery - but simply because the children of royalty and the court were among the best educated people of their time. The upper classes have always had access to the very best of whatever was available. When you look at people like Queen Elizabeth I, they had every advantage that wealth and station could buy, including the best scholars of the day as their tutors. They were surrounded by artists, writers, diplomats and scholars. Therefore, their language could be expected to show a refinement and precision far surpassing the ordinary. That’s hardly surprising, They represented what was considered the best of their society, hence they would set a good example for others. If not them, then who? Tyrone and LaQueesha?
Speaking poorly is prima facie evidence of thinking poorly. Making excuses for it, and actually attacking those who act to preserve correct use of language only further debases what little is left of our once higher culture.
And the more barbarians we let into this country illegally, the more new American generations will become like them in low thoughts and low deeds.
Gary wrote:“Speaking poorly is prima facie evidence of thinking poorly.”
Exactly. Grammar is essentially nothing more than logic.
High civilizations are not produced (or sustained) by illogical thought. Or illogical people.
[example: “He doesn’t give me nothin’.” The double negative is not merely ungrammatical; it is illogical. It contradicts itself.(so he DOES give you something)
