The Language Wars Read online

  It is worth being clear, though, that there seem to be rules of language shared by all humans. The brain is a set of computational systems, a shrink-wrapped lump of molecular hardware. We are familiar with its inputs and outputs, but rather less familiar with the circuitry inside the black box, which performs its functions in ways that seem magical. The brain processes information, and within our neural networks there are systems that manage language according to a computational logic that is genetically specified. There is a level of grammar that is, to a significant degree, biologically determined.

  This ‘universal grammar’ is capable of generating the very different syntaxes of all human languages – that is, the different ways in which we organize words into sentences. It is one of our basic endowments, rather than something we learn. Modern views of the subject draw heavily on the work of Noam Chomsky, an academic maverick who by his own account experienced linguistic enlightenment while suffering from seasickness during an Atlantic crossing. Chomsky’s model of grammar, presented in the late 1950s, built on von Humboldt’s idea that an infinite number of utterances can be achieved while following a finite number of rules. Chomsky presented the human capacity for language as a computational system. His account of this, though today professedly ‘minimalist’, is forbiddingly technical. Its exact nature is not important here; what matters for present purposes is that the complicated and apparently innate rules of universal grammar, within which it is possible to exhibit immense creativity, are different from the elements of language that we learn – among them phoney rules of English usage.

  As I have suggested, the conventions of usage result from a sense of responsibility towards other users of our language. There are cogent reasons for trying to use language lucidly. In many everyday settings we are irritated by language that misleads us, unbalances us or needlessly and fruitlessly diverts our concentration. It is no fun to have to read twice a sentence which, on that second reading, we find we didn’t even want to read once. Skilful handling of language will tend to reduce the amount of cognitive effort one’s audience has to expend in getting at one’s meaning. If my expression is confused and ambiguous, I risk losing your attention.

  Chomsky has highlighted language’s main purposes: to transmit information, establish relationships, express our thoughts or clarify them, pursue knowledge and understanding, exercise our minds creatively, and play. In all but the last two of these, lucidity is vital. Precise and conventional use of language averts painful misunderstandings; for instance, if I am an air traffic controller talking a pilot through an emergency landing I should be scrupulously careful about the words I use when referring to positions and directions.2 Consider, also, the importance attached to language in the law. Many legal cases turn on issues of interpretation – assessing the intent of legislators, and locating the meanings of statements or assigning meanings to them. Precedent is important here. Habits, associations, taught beliefs, traditions and the generally accepted norms of social groups all inform the metaphysics of legal meaning. Because the occasions when legal writing is scrutinized are usually adversarial, writing of this kind needs to blend an impression of objectivity with a subtle advocacy of its positions.

  The justification for linguistic conventions is a pragmatic one. When they appear to be under threat, it does not mean that civilization is falling apart. Rather, the existing conventions are being superseded by new ones. Researchers such as the ‘language evolution’ specialist Simon Kirby draw a comparison between the behaviour of a language and that of a virus. The properties of a language are shaped by its need to survive in its physical environment. Robustness – structure, infectiousness and ease of assembly – is vital to its survival. This robustness is not the same thing as perfection: languages are full of clutter that’s not there for any reason which we can immediately identify, and where the reasons can be seen, their machinery may still be ugly.

  Languages are not wholly consistent. They are not perfectly logical. In fact, they are loaded with redundant information. Typically this performs a social function; it may make meaning easier to decode, or it may support the connection between people who might otherwise struggle to communicate. Redundancy can be something as simple as the u that tends to follow a q in English (inherited from Latin), my saying ‘PIN number’, or my reciting my phone number twice when leaving you voicemail; or it may be something more complex, such as the harmonious recurrences sewn into a poem. Generally, you need to pick up about three words in ten to get an inkling of what a conversation is about; it is the lack of redundancy in mathematics and its teaching that explains why so much maths bewilders so many people. Redundancy can be rhetorical, but it can also be a practical way of shielding meaning from confusion – a safeguard, a reassuring and stabilizing kind of predictability.

  To expect a natural language to behave like mathematics is akin to expecting a child to behave like an iPod. Nevertheless, English is often cited as an example of a language peculiarly ungoverned by logic. This view is especially likely to be advanced by French scholars, who have been arguing for well over three hundred years that theirs is a language of great clarity, possessed of incorruptible syntax and precise terminology. The founding father of this school of chauvinism was Claude Favre de Vaugelas, whose Remarques sur la langue française (1647) celebrated the lucid expression of the French royal court. Previously the poet François de Malherbe had, with amusing specificity, canonized the exemplary usage of the longshoremen who worked at the ‘port au foin’ (hay port) in Paris. Others, such as Joachim du Bellay and Antoine de Rivarol, believed that French was the closest language to the single tongue that was supposed to have existed before Babel. But French is not the language of reason, and English is not loose and unscientific.

  To be clear: this is a book about English, but sometimes I shall drop in on the phenomena and problems of other languages, because doing so promises to afford some extra insight into English’s conditions. And sometimes, too, I shall refer to English as ‘our’ language, although I recognize it may not be your language and in any case the possessive is misleading – for no one owns English.

  Besides, English is not monolithic. There are numerous different Englishes, many of which may in some respects strike me as alien. A number of these have a lot of speakers: Australian English, for instance, and the Englishes used in Jamaica and the Philippines. Others, such as the forms used in the Nicaraguan Corn Islands, in Namibia or on Pitcairn Island in the south Pacific, are little documented.

  A great many people use English as a second language. They, too, have a stake in its future. A distinction is sometimes drawn between the inner and outer circles of English, its traditional bases such as Britain or the US and those countries where it is not the native tongue but has been important historically – India and Singapore, for instance. The image was developed by Braj Kachru, an American academic born in Kashmir. Kachru also describes a third, ‘expanding’ circle that encompasses countries where English is used as a lingua franca, typically for business. This circle includes China and Japan.

  The English of the inner circle is infused with certain values that are not immediately apparent. Examples of this cultural baggage include an overt concern with accuracy, a liking for hard facts, a careful distinction between facts and opinions, an aversion to emotional display, an emphasis on the autonomy of the individual, a preoccupation with fairness and reasonableness, a hostility to exaggeration which often results in understatement, and explicit recognition of the limits of one’s knowledge.3 Clearly these tendencies pull us in different directions; we cannot manifest all of them at once. It is easy, moreover, to find innumerable examples of times when people from within the inner circle – those who use what the Polish-Australian scholar Anna Wierzbicka calls ‘Anglo cultural scripts’ – deviate from these norms. But there are concepts central to the ways in which inner-circle English-speakers express themselves that are deeply ingrained, little remarked upon, and different from the concepts embedded in the exp
ressions of people who use other languages.

  When I write of ‘our’ language, the possessive pronoun makes light of a great deal of cultural baggage. At the same time, my wording reflects a simple truth: people are proprietorial about the language they speak and write. Arguments about English have always been coloured by feelings about tradition, the distribution of power, freedom, the law and identity. Many of the debates and disputes surrounding English relate to education: any statement about methods of teaching and learning is grounded in politics, and when someone advances a so-called educational philosophy it is really an ideological programme.

  As Chomsky has said, ‘Questions of language are basically questions of power.’4 Language is a potent instrument for promoting notions of togetherness and of discord. There’s an old joke that a language is ‘a dialect with an army and a navy’, which spread and defend it. (The line is often attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich, although it was certainly not Weinreich who coined it.) It makes more sense to say that a language is a system of signs, where there is a standard way of writing those signs, and that it is promoted through formal education and government endorsement. Any definition of language will meet with objections in some quarters, but it would be hard to come up with a useful definition that did not convey – even if only implicitly – the idea summed up in the now rather hackneyed maxim ‘Language is power’. Power involves relationships, and those relationships tend to be unequal; they subsume loyalties, responsibilities, traditions and systems of control.

  Questions of English reverberate through our daily lives. When we use language, we may be making a social connection, answering a question, enjoying ourselves, passing time, or showing off, but fundamentally we imagine that the interest of the person or people to whom we are speaking is engaged.5 The desire to shape and emphasize this engagement is crucial. How do I get you to listen to me? Can I persuade you to like me, hire me, trust me, come and see my etchings? Manipulations of our language – by the state, advertisers, salespeople, factions, preachers, prophets, poets, cheats – are legion. Then there are other questions. How do we refer to social groups other than our own – people of a different ethnic background, say, or people with disabilities? How do we address strangers, which words are hurtful, and when is it okay to swear? Is the language of an email different from the language of conversation? What songs can we sing, and how should we pray?

  The limits of English have long caused concern. In moments of creative despair, Joseph Conrad thought English incapable of conveying feelings. It was a language only for dogs and horses. Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, had a precise idea of the scope of different languages, and reputedly chose to speak English only to geese. Voltaire complained to James Boswell that it was not possible for him to speak English because to do so one had to place the tongue between the teeth – and he had lost his teeth. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Pink and White Tyranny (1871) the narrator comments, ‘Just as there is no word in the Hottentot vocabulary for “holiness,” or “purity,” so there are no words in our savage English to describe a lady’s dress’: to do the matter justice it was necessary ‘to write half, or one third, in French’. Then there is Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), who comments with what may seem some justice that ‘in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity … But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd.’ Bob Dylan offers this: ‘You know, the English can say “marvellous” pretty good. They can’t say “raunchy” so good, though. Well, we each have our thing.’6

  It’s true: we do each have our ‘thing’, and English’s ‘thing’ is complaint. When we discuss the English language, we illuminate our foibles, prejudices and ambitions. Language creates communities, and some of these are solidarities of complainers and pedants. A statement about proper English is a statement not only about the language, but also about people – about who the proper English are, or just about who the proper users of English are. Typically, the celebrants and defenders of proper English are celebrating or defending something other than language.

  In 1989, Professor Brian Cox presented a report proposing large reforms in the national curriculum. This had been commissioned by the Conservative government, and the Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, chose to announce its recommendations before the main body of the report was published. A few days later Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, made a statement that ‘We’ve got to produce people who can write proper English … English is taught so bloody badly. If we want people who write good English … it cannot be done with the present system and all the nonsense academics come up with. It is a fundamental problem. We must educate for character.’7 The switch here from ‘proper’ to ‘good’ is brisk, as though they are the same. But propriety and goodness are defined in different ways.

  If I refer to proper behaviour, something’s proper place, a proper course of action, a proper attitude, a person having a proper job, proper care or consideration, proper use or treatment, providing proper training or doing things properly, I am unlikely as I do so to be explicit about what I mean by ‘proper’. Instead I assume that you know – that we share a cultural norm or standard. More than that, I am indicating that you should know. Challenge me to explain what I mean by this word, and I am likely to flounder. The ‘proper’ is negatively defined: it is the absence of proper behaviour, things not being in their proper places, someone not having a proper job, or the neglect of proper training that prompt our aggrieved use of this adjective.

  Where does our sense of the ‘proper’ come from?8 In arguing about what is right and what wrong in any language, we appeal to authority. This authority is embodied in academies, the Ministry of Education (or its equivalent) and universities, as well as in the pronouncements of people who have appointed themselves authorities and have become known as such. We commonly accept these judges’ pronouncements. There are also geographical criteria. These are evident in statements such as ‘Natives of Perugia speak the best Italian’ or ‘People in Alsace have funny accents’. Typically, we feel that there are certain environments in which our language is decently used, and we favour the usage that obtains there. Sometimes, too, we defer to the example of a significant literary figure, saying that so-and-so is a model of correctness. A broader view is that ‘correct English is that which is used by the best writers’, but who are they, and what are the criteria for their being so esteemed? The definition tends to be circular: the best writers are the ones who best use the resources of English.

  When we appeal to aesthetics, our arguments become nebulous. The aesthetically sensitive arbiter will argue that whatever is beautiful in language is good. The problem here would seem to be that the desire for beautiful language concentrates on language as an object – on the sensory pleasure it affords rather than on what it signifies. Besides, as we know from our observation of others, the constant pursuit of beauty can be embarrassing.

  Alternatively, we may claim that the most elegant usage is that of the social elite. Perhaps this now seems an absurd position, but not long ago it would have been perfectly normal. The democratic option is to say that all doubtful matters should be decided by referendum, or just to say that the majority is right. This idea was touched upon by Horace in his treatise Ars Poetica, published around 18 BC. He wrote of the power of ‘ius et norma loquendi’ – i.e. the law and standard of speaking. ‘Norma loquendi’ is a phrase that has acquired some currency, as in the playful title of the popular journalist William Safire’s book In Love with Norma Loquendi. We also appeal to logic. Although there are discrepancies between logic and the ways we use language, we frequently use arguments from logic (or from what we imagine to be logic) in order to justify our choice of words or find fault with others’ choices. In practice we tend to find our usual practices logical and anything else illogical. ‘Logic’ is often a mask for smugness and jingoism.

  All attitudes to usage can be classified as either pre
scriptive or descriptive, and current arguments about the subject often involve the words prescriptivist and descriptivist both as adjectives and as nouns. A prescriptivist dictates how people should speak and write, whereas a descriptivist avoids passing judgements and provides explanation and analysis. So, one says what ought to happen, and the other says what does happen. This antagonism, constructed mainly by modern academic discussions of language and linguists, is now commonly used when discussing writers on language before the twentieth century. Pigeonholing of this kind results in some ludicrous misrepresentations of what these writers thought.

  The history of prescriptions about English – of grammar texts, manuals of style and ‘O tempora o mores’-type laments – is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests. Instinctively, we find the arbitrariness of existence hard to accept. Our desire to impose order on the world, which means inventing the forms of language rather than discovering them, is a creative act. Furthermore, the quarrel between descriptivists and prescriptivists (terms I shall use for want of good alternatives) is a sort of mad confederacy: each party thrives on lambasting the other.

  Strong feelings do not beget strong arguments. The default setting for prescriptivists is to say what we should not do, rather than be precise and consistent about what we should. Sanctifying good English is achieved mainly by marking off a category called ‘Bad English’. They are thus really proscriptivists, and their attitude is captured in the title of the 1883 manual Don’t, published by the playwright Oliver Bell Bunce under the pseudonym ‘Censor’. Bunce’s little book, subtitled A Manual of Mistakes and Improprieties more or less prevalent in Conduct and Speech, is full of instructions such as ‘Don’t say lady when you mean wife’ (which may suggest he imagines a male audience), ‘Don’t fail to exercise tact’ (surely the first three words there are redundant?) and – a majestic catch-all – ‘Don’t speak ungrammatically’.9 This negativity is something we can all recognize as a recurrent feature of the way we are taught language. It also highlights the contingency of conventions, to which I referred at the end of the previous chapter: many of Bunce’s modern counterparts would be critical of his use of what are in effect double negatives. Writing of this kind is symptomatic of one of the most pernicious features of the English-speaker’s world: the belief that the avoidance of mistakes is more important than the achievement of excellence. This belief is allied to a tendency to think that one misstep undoes the effect of a hundred perfect strides.