Even more comments on language can
be read in
Lionel Deimel’s
Web Log. For a listing of all of them, click
here.
|
For about as long as I can remember, I've had a fascination with the
mechanisms of the English language. In junior high school, not only did I
diagram sentences
without complaint, but I even sought out sentences that challenged the adequacy
of those arcane grammatical representations taught in English class. (Try
diagramming—try even understanding—the first sentence of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
There is, of course, some question about where the first sentence ends. The
question mark after the second line—which appears to be genuine—requires
a strange interpretation of the next two lines. It should, I think, be replaced
by a comma, which makes sense, but also creates the grammatical monstrosity I
challenge you to diagram. I suspect Francis Scott Key recognized the problem but
lacked the audaciousness to use a comma.)
I loved linguistic rules. They appealed to my sense
of order and gave me that special feeling of power that comes from knowing what
others don’t. I treasure each obscure rule that I can cite to justify changes I
want to make to other people's writing.
Unfortunately, neither high school nor college taught me many new rules. Teachers
were much more interested in topics like symbolism in literature, a phenomenon about whose very existence I harbored serious doubts. (One of my high school
English teachers once asked the class to consider what symbolism might be
present in the spelling of a character’s name in Moby Dick, the Manxman. What,
she said, could be the significance of “man cross man?” What indeed!)
In graduate school, I studied formal grammars, and
I came to realize that our forebears created language, not grammar.
The rules, of which I was so fond, are mechanisms designed to describe, rather
the prescribe the language. The mechanisms tend to be defective in many subtle
ways. This is not to say that rules are useless, but good use of the language is
harder than the rules suggest. Moreover, English (and particularly American
English) is something of a moving target. Not until quite recently, when I read
H. L. Menken’s The American Language, did I realize that many
conventions I assumed were ancient are, in fact, much newer.
The truth is that my personality favors rules and
order, whatever their objective utility. I have mellowed over the years, however, largely
as the result of the technical editing I did at the
Software Engineering Institute. My concern has become less one of
“correctness” than of utility. Good writing communicates the desired
message. Good rules (putting a comma after an introductory phrase, for
instance) facilitate effective communication, and bad rules (the
“shall”/“will” distinction, say) are just so much baggage.
The utility argument can be a slippery one, of
course. The controversy over the teaching of Ebonics
is very much tied up with the “usefulness” of black dialect. Not only do we
need to communicate effectively with one another, however, but we need also to
preserve our capacity to do so. “Dumbing down” the language, insofar as it
makes it more difficult to express particular ideas as distinct from other ones,
is a bad thing. For example, the use of “gay” as a (somewhat ambiguous)
synonym of “homosexual” has made other uses of “gay" problematic.
“With gay abandon” takes on a different meaning than formerly. (I apologize
for any political incorrectness here, but the examples cited are likely to seem
more interesting and “relevant”—does anyone still use the word this
way?—than examples involving comma faults.)
All this is by way of introduction to other
thoughts about American English I hope you will find amusing.
— LED, 5/25/2008
|
Your Mileage May Vary