The Language Wars Page 2
In truth, I don’t. I could pedantically reply that there are no degrees of uniqueness. More to the point, though, the present moment does not strike me as sad. It is normal to imagine one is living in an age of exceptional violence and anarchy, yet this is to be blind to the problems of every other age. Our sense of the particular seriousness of the difficulties we face is sharpened by narcissism, and more than that by the belief that we can improve matters. We take a morbid pleasure in believing that the special randomness of our world requires of us a special heroism. Yet novelty is not the same thing as decline. English is no more going to the dogs than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century when pessimists predicted that within a hundred years the speech of Britons and of Americans would be mutually unintelligible, or in the 1550s when the humanist scholar Thomas Wilson complained in The Arte of Rhetorique, a book ‘for the use of all suche as are studious of eloquence sette forth in Englische’, that well-travelled gentlemen had lately started to ‘powder’ their conversation with confusing ‘oversea language’.
To say this, I recognize, is to provoke. Experience suggests that you can always start a row by staking a claim about English usage. Get mixed up in the question of plurals, for instance. Insist that, since the word data is plural in Latin, if we have been given only one piece of information it is a ‘datum’. Allege that when confronted with more than one hippopotamus, one should speak not of hippopotamuses, but of ‘hippoipotamou’. Say that a Birmingham accent – be it Birmingham, England, or Birmingham, Alabama, or one of the two Birminghams in Ohio – is inferior to a middle-class London one. Claim for that matter that some languages are spoken much faster than others or that Americans are ruining English. Protest, as someone did to me at a festival, that ‘However stupid English grammar is, at least English has got grammar – unlike Chinese.’ Assert that ‘The crowd is on its feet’ is better than the ‘The crowd are on their feet’, or insist that you cannot say ‘The class of ’89 is having a reunion, and there’s a big surprise in store for them’.
When we argue about language, we are often concerned with the ways in which it impairs thought. Words seem to lack the precision of numbers or symbols, and the elasticity of language propels misunderstandings. This argument is not new. Those who have studied language most deeply have done so in the hope that it will enable them to understand thought and indeed life itself. Meanwhile, philosophy is forever encroaching on linguistic concerns.
These are sensitive areas, and there is a distinguished tradition of thinkers who have created philosophical mayhem by kicking against conventional and unreflective images of what language is and how it works. We can trace this tradition back as far as Plato’s Cratylus in the fourth century BC, which examines some of the basic problems in the study of language (such as the conventions of how we name things), and the more sustained efforts of Plato’s pupil Aristotle, who was especially concerned with establishing the vocabulary we use to describe and categorize reality. Their successors have included St Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century, who speculated about the process by which language skills are acquired; John Locke in the seventeenth, who argued that words are arbitrary signs denoting our ideas; Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Prussian diplomat and educational theorist, who insisted on treating language as a phenomenon situated in reality rather than as something abstract (a ‘dead contraption’), and thought of it as a creative activity, making infinite uses of a finite number of elements; Jacob Grimm, famous with his brother Wilhelm for collecting folk tales, and responsible also for making historical research the cornerstone of linguistics; and Ferdinand de Saussure, who changed this, emphasizing the idea of language as a system of relationships, and positing the need to study a language system not through its historical development (a diachronic approach), but at a particular moment in time (a synchronic one).
Modern linguistics owes something to all these figures, but is especially indebted to Saussure. Its message is that the present is the key to the past. By this I mean that the forces that created languages are at work right now. Looking at languages as they exist today enables us to understand their history. What this also suggests is that things we may consider problems in the present are in fact evidence of the powerful creative forces of language.
Many of the large challenges that face us may be new, but the issues at stake are familiar, and the little details that niggle us have niggled previous generations just as much, if not more. We hear worriers disparaging imported words (does nouvelle vague accomplish more than new wave?), slang (today’s term of approval, let’s say hot, may tomorrow seem stale), abbreviations (sometimes with justice – it amazes me that ‘Accid anal prev’ is used instead of ‘Accident analysis and prevention’), rickety grammar (‘Once she’d been neutered, the princess went to collect her cat’) and the lapses of public figures who ‘ought to know better’ (George W. Bush saying ‘Rarely is the question asked: “Is our children learning?”’). As a result we may imagine that we are living in an age of egregious stupidity and crassness – and of remarkable linguistic precariousness. But this suspicion was just as common in the England of Chaucer, Shakespeare or Milton, in the Britain of Dickens, and in the America of the Pilgrim Fathers, George Washington or Martin Luther King.
Furthermore, some things we now consider to be mistakes or solecisms were once quite acceptable. Do we pretend not to understand Edgar in King Lear when he vows ‘to take the basest and most poorest shape’? Are we racked with indignation when we hear Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice read a letter from Antonio containing the words ‘All debts are cleared between you and I’? The stout defenders of the Queen’s English – a construct first mentioned in 1592 by the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe – or indeed of the King’s English – mentioned in 1553 by Thomas Wilson – pretend that they exert themselves in order to ensure that the language remains a channel for clear communication. But the sorts of usage that offend them hardly prevent communication. When Mick Jagger sings ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’, none of us can in good faith claim that his double negative has led us to believe he feels blissfully satisfied. When Chaucer writes of the Knight in The Canterbury Tales ‘He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde’, we may be thrown by ‘vileynye’ (it means the Knight never said anything defamatory or discreditable), but the accumulation of negatives does not prevent us from sniffing the courtly aroma of the Knight’s politeness.
One obvious difference here is that Mick Jagger is speaking (after a fashion), whereas Chaucer is writing. Different standards should be applied to the spoken and written forms of the language. Yet often people discussing the use of English fail to recognize the distinction. I shall be saying plenty more about this. Or rather, writing plenty more.
With reference to both speech and writing, most of us practise linguistic hygiene, brushing or swabbing away what we see as pollutants – jargon, vulgarisms, profanity, bad grammar and mispronunciations – and sometimes in the process replacing one kind of evil with another. Alarmists are apt to vilify the types of people they think most culpable: they have in the past condemned travellers, shopkeepers, journalists, university students, nurses, hairdressers, people who live in cities, homosexuals, the authors of translations, and women.8 All of us, besides using language, comment on it, and we complain about others’ usage far more often than we applaud it. Where language is concerned, some are engineers, but more of us are doctors.
This kind of appraisal can be entertaining, but its main appeal is that it allows us to tidy up reality. At the same time it reveals our aversion to disorder. We fear not being able to make ourselves understood, and fear also that the essentials of our world-view are not shared by others. When we practise what the linguist Deborah Cameron has designated ‘verbal hygiene’, we expose our anxieties about otherness and difference.9 It can seem as though we positively want to feel that our language is coming unstuck. Even if other aspects of our existence appear beyond our control, language feels as if it can be rescued from the chaos of modernity
. If we can arrest language change, the thinking goes, we can hold off other kinds of change.10 All the while, people who stress that change is inevitable are dismissed as wimpish egalitarians, pluralists, relativists – as ‘Shit happens’ defeatists. Yet if the ‘Anything goes’ approach seems an abdication of responsibility, its opposite, pernickety micro-management, recalls in its desperateness King Canute’s mythic efforts to turn back the waves.
It is time to look at a rule, to see pernicketiness in action. I want to consider something seemingly humdrum, which is nonetheless one of the most enduringly contentious subjects in English grammar. My chosen issue is the split infinitive, perennial bugbear of neo-Victorians and TV’s (fictional) Dr Frasier Crane. The opening credits of Star Trek contain the best-known of all split infinitives. The mission of the Starship Enterprise is, we are informed, ‘to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.’ It’s a line much satirized, as by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the heroes of the wild and long-lost Galactic Empire are said to have dared ‘to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before’. But is this phrasing so dreadful? Leaving aside for a moment the question of what rule there is about the treatment of infinitives (and also the decision to say ‘no man’ rather than ‘no one’), we might usefully focus on the rhetorical force of the statement as it is at present couched. The rhythm here is important. The three-part structure ‘to explore … to seek … to go’ is disrupted by the abrupt introduction of ‘boldly’. Rather than being a bad thing, this accentuates our impression of the narrator’s excitement about the sheer boldness of the quest. The assonance of ‘to boldly go’ is more striking – not only because of its rhythm, but also because less compressed – than that of ‘to go boldly’. ‘Boldly to go’ would just seem precious.
The split infinitive is found at least as early as the thirteenth century. It occurs a couple of times in Chaucer, rather more often in the writings of John Wyclif, and a huge amount in the fifteenth-century works of Reginald Pecock, a Welsh bishop who delighted in the form. It seems to have been considered inelegant for most of the two centuries that followed – Shakespeare has only one, in a sonnet (‘Thy pity may deserve to pitied be’) – and was uncommon until the later stages of the eighteenth century, when it began to appear in the writings of even the most punctilious authors, such as Samuel Johnson. Hostility to the practice of splitting infinitives developed in the nineteenth century. A magazine article dating from 1834 may well be the first published condemnation of it. A large number of similar prohibitions followed. The first to call it a ‘split infinitive’ was a contributor to the magazine Academy in 1897.11
The prohibition originates in a regard for Latin, and for some people today is reinforced by the split infinitive’s impossibility in German. The experimental psychologist Steven Pinker has suggested that ‘forcing modern speakers of English … not to split an infinitive because it isn’t done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas’.12 But let’s just probe the rule for a moment. In Latin, the infinitive is expressed by a single word: amare means ‘to love’, venire means ‘to come’. It is, in short, unsplittable. Now consider Latin’s treatment of nouns: in Latin there is no definite or indefinite article – ‘a girl’ is puella, ‘the threads’ is fimbriae. No one would suggest that we cannot say ‘a clever girl’ or ‘the broken threads’. Yet isn’t this a split nominative? Is it not as much of a crime as a split infinitive?
‘I am going to really do it’ means something different from ‘I am really going to do it’ and ‘Really I am going to do it’ and ‘I am going to do it really’. The location in this sentence of the adverb really is not – should not – be a matter merely of propriety or euphony. It should be determined by which version best conveys one’s intended meaning.
This principle can be illustrated by the case of another common adverb, only. It pays to keep only as close as possible to the word it modifies. Consider, for instance, the disparity between ‘I only take off my socks when she asks’ and ‘I take off my socks only when she asks’. For good measure, let’s add ‘I take off only my socks when she asks’. Three rather different pictures of domestic life emerge here. A fourth develops if I change the sentence again: ‘Only I take off my socks when she asks.’ Obviously there is no infinitive to split in these examples, but they suggest the importance of where we place an adverb. Sometimes we have to split infinitives, not only because anything else sounds weird, but because the prissy avoidance of a split infinitive results in a distortion of our meaning. It’s hard to see how I could neatly and economically reformulate the sentence ‘I expect our output to more than double next year’. The proper thing to do is whatever seems most natural, least fidgety. But what kind of a guideline is that?
Most people cleave to certain rules about English. They behave as though these are eternal, immutable edicts – the violation of which is a symptom of low intelligence and poor breeding. I can remember being chastised at school by a teacher who insisted that a civilized person could never put a comma before and or use the words lot and got. Most of us have been encouraged to believe that rules of this kind are important. And there are a large number of them – perhaps as many as 3,500. This is the number of distinct points of grammar identified in the index to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), a 1,779-page tome by the eminent scholars Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik.
I am not going to claim to be immune from these ‘rules’. I find myself wincing when someone says ‘between you and I’. I’ll admit, too, that when I hear this I suspect that the person who has said it is trying to sound smart and educated. But, even as I wince, my inner linguist recognizes that the response is aesthetic and is one which I have been conditioned to express. For these rules – note my earlier inverted commas – are not really rules, but conventions. At different times, and in different places, different conventions are the norm. Of course, some of these conventions become so deeply ingrained in us that we find it hard to grant they are merely that; we think of them as timeless, profound and inherently sensible. Conventions can put down deep roots; they can be hard to eradicate. Yet they have changed before and will change again.
Conventions are contingent. Communication may depend on our observing them, but, examined dispassionately, many seem odd. (To get away from language for a moment, consider the conventions of chess, video games, formal dress or opera.) If I stop to think about why it’s correct to say X but not to say Y, I may not be able to come up with much of an explanation. We generally adhere to the conventions because it is practical to do so. A convention is a solution to a recurrent problem of coordination; by sticking to it, one not only overcomes the problem, but makes it invisible. If you are playing football and you decide to pick the ball up and run with it, you are likely to be sent from the pitch; few people are going to think you have done something clever, witty or original, and most will find your behaviour difficult to understand, because you have violated the rules of the game. Where language is concerned, we play by what we understand to be the rules because we sense – on the whole unconsciously – a responsibility to the people with whom we are communicating.
This book is written in what I hope is a crisp kind of standard English (of which more anon), because that is what I have been taught, that is what I have tended to absorb as a reader, and that is what I imagine the audience for this book is likely to favour. Writing more colloquially would feel wrong. Yet as soon as one begins to analyse the idea of what is correct and what incorrect, one sees how entangled it is with notions of what’s appropriate, felicitous, effective, useful and socially acceptable.
2
The survival machine
The power of language and the fight for English
You and I know what language is, and we know that we have a command of it. We would, I imagine, be relaxed abou
t saying this. But what exactly is it that we know?
The linguist Leonard Bloomfield provides an answer: ‘Language has been developed in the interchange of messages, and every individual who has learned to use language has learned it through such interchange.’ Accordingly, the language an individual uses is not his or her creation, but consists of adopted habits. From childhood, we practise language until the details of it are ‘mechanized and unconscious’. As a result we rarely consider exactly what our use of language involves.1 Think for a moment about the movements you have to make with your tongue and lower lip merely in order to articulate a single word: on reflection, the precise mechanics of the process seem – unless you are an actor or a singer perhaps – quite strange, and this is before you take into account the operations of the larynx, the glottis, the soft palate and so on. We rarely consider the physical basis of language. The complex set of processes which enables us to achieve anything from a little interjection to a sophisticated speech is something we tend not to examine. And this lack of examination is a theme of our entire relationship to language – for language is a central plank of our existence about which we nevertheless have beliefs and opinions that, while passionate, are primitive and unscientific.
The capacity for language is biological. Language is one of what Richard Dawkins has called the ‘survival-machine actions’ that impel our existence. However, the form that language takes – the signs and sounds we learn, and many of the ways we combine them – is determined by the community in which we grow up. In Tahitian the verb comes at the start of a sentence. Speakers of Dyirbal in Queensland have traditionally had for all things an everyday word and an alternative one for use in the presence of their mothers-in-law. The Burushaski language spoken in some northern parts of Pakistan distinguishes four genders. Kalam, spoken in Papua New Guinea, has a mere ninety-six verbs. Language is natural; languages are culturally created.