Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
AWARENESS OF LANGUAGE AND HOW TO DIMINISH IT
I do not inhabit
a linguistic bunker. I read widely in books that are published in my own times.
I am exposed as much to everyday conversation as you are. My encounters with
the mass media in all their forms are as frequent as your own and (pardon me)
with my extensive background in film reviewing, television reviewing and book
reviewing, it is at least possible that I have reflected consciously more than
you have on the type of language used in all these contexts.
I am, therefore,
fully aware that language is always changing. I know that neologisms are being
coined constantly. I know that the meaning and applications of words change
and, out of the few hundred examples I could have chosen, I know that we would
no longer use “suffer” to mean “allow” or “permit” (as in “suffer the little children to come unto me”) and that
“sophisticated” has now come to mean “informed, educated, aware, fashionable”
rather than its old primary meaning “corrupted”.
I do not think
dictionary definitions are immutable and for all time.
I am, further,
fully aware that “rules” as to what is and is not acceptable usage are also
always changing. I would not advocate a return, in all its recommendations, to
the first edition of H.W.Fowler’s Modern
English Usage (in the 1920s) although, be it noted, Fowler was remarkably
“permissive” in his recommendations and mocked the pedants of his day.
So why is it
that I groan whenever I hear yet another academic nitwit or bore come on air to
tell us that “rules” of grammar are basically things of the past?
Nearly always
the nitwit or bore will precede his/her remarks by making the obvious points
I’ve made here – that language is always changing and so are ideas about
acceptable usage. Nitwit or bore will make these points stridently as if nobody
has thought of them before. Nitwit or bore will then proceed to the non sequitur that, therefore, we can say
goodbye to grammar and to the idea that there are any “rules” thereof. Often
nitwit or bore will throw in the (historically-inaccurate) canard that older
English grammar schemes were merely aping Latin and attempting to force English
into a Latin pattern. Fun will be had by quoting illustrious writers to show
how often they broke the “rules”, so therefore we all should.
` Latest
nitwit and bore I have heard performing all the above familiar feats was Steven Pinker,
psychologist and cognitive scientist best known for his popularising books
aimed at the general public (and, according to one cognitive neuroscientist of
my ken, regarded with caution by many of his professional peers because of the
gross simplifications he makes in many of his popularisations). [You can check out my views on Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature via the
index at right.]
Pinker has just produced a
book about language called The Sense of
Style. He was publicising it via a celebrity interview on Kim Hill’s radio show.
What ridiculous things style guides were, he said. How absurd grammatical rules
were. What he argued for was verbal “impact”. If we can be understood in a
particular context, who cares what sort of grammar we use? Of course he told us
how silly it was to worry about beginning sentences with conjunctions and splitting
infinitives. (But then Fowler ridiculed the same preoccupations ninety years
ago. And personally I am inclined to frequently split infinitives.) Why should
we worry about ending sentences with a preposition? he asked. After all,
Shakespeare wrote “We are such stuff as
dreams are made on.”
And so on and so (tiresomely
and predictably) on.
As a
counter-blast to Pinker, I could refer you to a very good (and witty) op.ed.
piece Nathan Heller wrote in the New
Yorker (3 November 2014 – you can find it easily on line) entitled “Steven
Pinker’s Bad Grammar”, wherein he notes how self-contradictory Pinker is and
how his scheme always leads to inexactness. Steven Pinker gets annoyed that
people make a [correct and helpful] distinction between “less” and “fewer”, but
then has to concede that sometimes one is more appropriate than the other.
Steven Pinker gets annoyed that people say you should not use “like” [rather
than “as” or “as if”] to introduce a clause, as in “Steven Pinker rabbited on like he knew what he was talking about.”
Steven Pinker would like to abolish “whom” as a piece of pedantry, but then is
aware of its valid uses.
In these
particulars, Steven Pinker is egregiously an ass.
But my groan at
the familiarity of his spiel comes from something more essential than Pinker’s
particular faults. It comes from my sense that those who attack style guides
and “rules” of grammar, self-evidently fallible though these things are, are
really advocating less awareness of how language is organised, and less thought
about how we use it.
I know that a
modern linguist would challenge easily the traditional meanings of terms such
as noun, pronoun, verb, main verb, auxiliary verb, participle, adverb, epithet,
adjective, conjunction, preposition, main clause, dependent clause, subordinate
clause and so forth. To teach things such as these to schoolchildren is now
regarded as passé. I remember, forty-odd years ago, when I was a trainee
English teacher, the notion of teaching systematic grammar as part of English
was beginning to be ridiculed. In the New Zealand context, I believe the rot really
set in among English teachers with a poisonous and redundant book called English Grammar: A Linguistic Study of its
Classes and Structures (first published 1968), produced by a collective of
linguistic malefactors called Scott, Bowley, Brockett, Brown and Goddard. As
trainee teachers we had this dreadful publication thrust into our hands and
were told that it was just the thing to displace pedantic, traditional grammar.
Bowley, Brockett, Sprocket, Knocket and Socket gave us a post-Chomsky-ite “transformative grammar”
where we no longer talked about adjectives and adverbs but talked about
“pre-modifiers’ and “post-modifiers”. But – guess what? – this “transformative
grammar” proved to be far more opaque and confusing to schoolchildren than the
traditional version of grammar had been. In a very short time – and with a
collective sigh of relief – teachers dropped the book. But gradually they
dropped the idea of teaching grammar too. The decline in the teaching of
foreign languages helped.
And what is the collective
result?
Not a brave new world in
which everybody, instinctively, speaks and writes well and clearly – but a
world in which there is simply less awareness of how language works and
functions.
The systematic learning of
grammar never guaranteed that everybody would be a great stylist. But it did at
least ensure that more people would understand the nature of the beast they
deployed daily.
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