Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!
—WILLIAM STRUNK, JR.
What do language pundits have in common with the wild-eyed crowds at certain political rallies or raucous sporting events? They have chosen a side. Fired by the thought that no one can express a thought clearly anymore, they see themselves on the side of right, light, and civilization. Young people who speak differently from the would-be guardians of proper language do drive the latter into a rage. The clumsy writing of high schoolers or college students causes spittle-flecked fury. Perhaps they see other ethnic groups speaking their native language differently than traditionalists do, and they are further provoked and annoyed. Doesn’t anyone know how to use the language anymore?
In 2003, Lynne Truss published a little book that she admits she was stunned to see become a runaway bestseller. First published in Britain, it reached number one on The New York Times’ list for nonfiction and stayed put for weeks. It has now sold more than 3 million copies worldwide, appeared in an illustrated edition and a children’s edition, and became a publishing phenomenon so explosive it surprised Truss herself. Her subject? Punctuation.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation takes its name from a joke about a panda who, like so many talking animals, walks into a bar. The bear orders food, eats it, draws a pistol, and unloads. To explain his behavior to the patrons as he saunters out, he tosses a “poorly-punctuated” wildlife manual over his shoulder, saying “I’m a panda. Look it up.” The manual duly tells the reader that a panda is a small, furry bear that eats, shoots and leaves.
But to Truss, punctuation is no joke. Page after page, she unleashes not just irritation but fury on the decline of English punctuation and those who hasten it. She proudly calls herself a “stickler,” and her thrilled readers could safely be called the same. What can possibly cause them such emotion over commas and periods?
The sticklers Truss appeals to in the book are distinguished by several features. One is anger out of proportion to the crime. They can’t merely be distressed at the state of modern language use. They must say, “It makes me want to scream when I read ‘TOMATOE’S ON SALE,’ ” or “Every time I hear ‘between you and I’ it’s like nails on a blackboard.” Truss herself turned her outrage knob to “blinding” by writing that those who misplace apostrophes “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.”
All that rage must feel good on some level. After all, Truss was not the first to discover that greengrocers and sign painters are not the most adroit punctuators on earth. The insights in Eats, Shoots & Leaves are nothing new. How, then, did she sell so many books? One suspects it is her style, with nary a sentence failing to scream bloody murder or whip up a linguistic lynch mob. She doesn’t do subtlety.
And if language rage feels good when you do it alone, when the usage police find one another, it is rage on uppers. The phrase “Sticklers, Unite!” is the unofficial motto of Truss’s book. The novelist David Foster Wallace invented a fictional Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts in one novel, a stickler union of sorts. In real life, the novelist’s family used code name “SNOOT” to describe themselves, the usage militia.* The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), “for pen-toters appalled by wanton displays of Bad English,” claims six thousand members. SPOGG features friendly blogs on its own website and sponsors National Grammar Day (March 4). Like most pleasant feelings, whatever feels good about language seething feels better when it’s shared with others.
This epiphany—“I never realized that other people felt like I do”—points to one of the key features of the grammar and usage snob: the delicious feeling of seeing something that only a select few have ever seen before. The archetypal grammar grouch feels that
In other words, language “sticklers” thrill in a sense of uniqueness: their language is especially precious, it is especially threatened, and it is especially threatened right now as opposed to other times in history.
This will probably come as a disappointment, then, to the sticklers reading this, but it nonetheless has to be said: generation after generation of grown-ups and sticklers have said the same thing, through every period in human history, for languages in every corner of the earth. If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, that it never has.
Language changes. The average language vigilante claims to know this and, if she has an English degree, will know it especially vividly from the history of literature. Of the first work known to be written in English, the epic Beowulf, barely a word will be immediately clear to the modern reader:
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
From that Old English of a thousand years ago, the situation had improved a bit three hundred years later. The text below, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is recognizably English but still opaque to those who haven’t studied the vocabulary and grammar of Middle English:
Whan that the knyght had thus his tale ytoold
In al the route nas ther yong ne oold
That he ne seyde it was a noble storie
And worthy for to drawen to memorie
And namely the gentils everichon.
In those three centuries, English had changed so much that Chaucer would barely have been able to read Beowulf, if at all, and would probably not have been able to understand a spoken conversation with a Beowulf-era English-speaker either.
Another three centuries or so along, English had become this, from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus:
MENEUIS AGRIPPA: What work’s my Countrimen in hand? Where go you with Bats and Clubs? The matter Speake I pray you.
SECOND CITIZEN: Our busines isn’t vnknowne to th’ Senat, they 60 haue had inkling this fortnight what we intend to do, w now wee’l shew em in deeds: they say poore Suters haue strong breaths, they shal know we haue strong arms too.
We can just about make this out, but in this passage it’s striking how distant it is. Modern editions of Shakespeare, with their changes of his spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, have helped generations of English teachers make Shakespeare seem contemporary to tenth-graders. Plus, when we watch Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet we know the stories and lines so well that we have no trouble following along. But a random passage from a less well-known play, unchanged by modern editing, shows more starkly how different the language is, and not only in spelling and punctuation: English had different pronouns (thou, ye); word endings (second-person verb ending—est, the third-person ending—eth); word order (“The matter Speake I pray you”); and the use or lack of auxiliary verbs (“Where go you?”). The pronunciation of Shakespeare’s era would be quite strange to the modern ear, too: “deeds” would have been pronounced something like “dades.”
When the United States came on the scene about two centuries later, the language was still in flux. At the time of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin thought all nouns should be capitalized. Noah Webster imposed spelling changes on a country that clearly did not think there was only one correct way to write a word. And Thomas Jefferson’s apostrophes would have had Lynne Truss hacking him to pieces: “[W]hen we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with it’s deformity … we are pleased with the subsequent atonement, and view with emulation a soul candidly acknowleging it’s fault and making a just reparation.”
So language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language perfect, in the language pundit’s mind? One has the feeling that the decline-mongers would feel rather sheepish hazarding any answer. The 1950s? The Edwardian era? The real answer, however rarely expressed, seems to be “when I learned it as a young person.” I, for one, have zero doubt that when my generation is in its sixties, we will think that the kids can’t talk anymore and education was really at its peak in the 1980s. But does anyone seriously claim to be able to show when, exactly, there was a “high point” of English and why that point and not others was the peak?
The fact is that scolds have been bewailing others’ vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar virtually since English was written down. The first printer in English, William Caxton, complained about English’s diversity and change in a story he told around 1490:
For we English men are so borne under the domination of the moon, which is never steadfast, but ever wavering, waxing one season and waning and decreasing another season.… [O]ne of them named Sheffield, a textile trader, came into a house and asked for food, and especially he asked for eggs [eggys], and the good woman answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but wanted eggs. And she did not understand him. And then at last another said that he wanted eyren. Then the good woman said that she understood him well. Lo, what should a man in these days now write, eggys or eyren? Certainly it is hard to please every man by cause of diversity and change of language.
By the Elizabethan period a century later, a “standard” English based on the London dialect was being built, though other dialects persisted around England. At the same time, poets and playwrights played with still-fluid conventions. Shakespeare violated virtually every rule that would later become a prescriptive shibboleth, gleefully splitting infinitives, using “they” with a singular antecedent, verbing nouns, ending sentences with prepositions, and so forth.
The new standard English, arising after Caxton and still developing in Shakespeare’s time, was based on the scribes of London’s Chancery, which produced government documents. And with the growth of standard English, a growth in prescriptivist dictates could not be far off. The existence of an emerging standard meant the beginning of linguistic self-consciousness: the desire to speak “correctly,” and the fear of being looked down on.
Why is it “wrong” to end a sentence with a preposition? Did you even notice that I just did it two sentences ago? Unless you are a copy editor, you probably didn’t. That’s because this is the natural way to frame that sentence. Who, upon seeing a cake in the office break room, says, “For whom is this cake?” instead of “Who’s the cake for?” Where did this rule come from?
The answer will surprise even most English teachers: John Dryden, the seventeenth-century poet less well known as an early, influential stickler. In a 1672 essay, he criticized his literary predecessor Ben Jonson for writing “The bodies that these souls were frightened from.” Why the prepositional bee in Dryden’s syntactical bonnet? This pseudo-rule probably springs from the same source many others do: the classical languages. Dryden said he liked to compose in Latin and translate into English, as he valued the precision and clarity he believed Latin required of writers. The preposition-final construction is impossible in Latin. Hence: it is impossible in English. Confused by his logic? Linguists remain so to this day. But once Dryden proclaimed the rule, it made its way into the first generation of English usage books roughly a century later and thence into the minds of two hundred years of English teachers and copy editors.
The rule has no basis in clarity (“Who’s that cake for?” is perfectly clear); history (it was made up from whole cloth); literary tradition (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Henry Adams, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and dozens of other great writers have violated it); or purity (it isn’t native to English but probably stolen from Latin; clause-final prepositions exist in English’s cousin languages such as Danish and Icelandic). Many people know that the Dryden rule is nonsense. From the great usage-book writer Henry Fowler in the early twentieth century, usage experts began to caution readers to ignore it. The New York Times flouts it. The “rule” should be put to death, but it may never be. Even those who know it is ridiculous observe it for fear of annoying others.
Some of these invented rules managed to make their way into our lives, to plague us endlessly. But more often throughout history, prescriptivist grousing has utterly failed to stop language change. Jonathan Swift, writing about a century after Shakespeare, was the wickedest satirist of his generation. But when it came to language, the humor drained from him. In 1712, to the Earl of Oxford, he wrote:
[O]ur Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.
To Swift, English had borrowed too much French. The young nobility were no longer getting a proper education. Spelling was slowly being altered to match pronunciation changes. He even wrote that “I would rather have trusted the Refinement of our Language, as far as it relates to Sound, to the Judgment of the Women, than of illiterate Court-Fops, half-witted Poets, and University-Boys.” Women! Things must have been bad indeed.
One writing change annoyed Swift in particular:
There is another Sett of Men who have contributed very very must to the spoiling of the English Tongue; I mean the Poets, from the Time of the Restoration. These Gentlemen … to save Time and Pains, introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses; and this they have frequently done, so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable.
The offending examples? Swift offered “Drudg’d, Disturb’d, Rebuk’t, Fledg’d, and a thousand others.” He thought the -ed ending should be both spelled out and pronounced in every instance. Before Swift, it always had been, but by his time, there was some free variation, depending on what fit better into poetic meter, for example. Over time, though, the trend against pronouncing the -ed ending was too strong. Today, “disturbed,” “rebuked,” and so forth must be pronounced in the way Swift hated so much. Yesterday’s abomination is today’s rule.
The particular change involved in “disturbèd” becoming “disturb’d” is natural almost to the point of universality in the long run. Latin had hominem; modern French, its descendant, has homme (pronounced “um”). Classical Arabic has kabir and saghir (big and small); modern spoken Arabic has kbir and sghir. Time is hard on unstressed syllables, grinding them down as the pronounced -ed ending was. And so on through languages everywhere. It’s as natural as life is short.
Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, Swift not only loathed this banal and common change; he ascribed it to moral failing:
I am afraid, My Lord, that with all the real good Qualities of our Country, we are naturally not very Polite. This perpetual Disposition to shorten our Words, by retrenching the Vowels, is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended, and whose Languages labour all under the same Defect.
Fast-forward three hundred years, and you can just hear Swift’s successors complain that the teenage use of “like” signifies fuzzy thinking or that the rising intonation used by many teenagers (“So I really liked this movie? I saw it with Brett?”) is a sign of shallowness. Not content to note a change or say they don’t like how it sounds, the sticklers make snap judgments about others’ souls.
Swift’s preferred solution to sound change, grammatical evolution, and new vocabulary had already been tried elsewhere in Europe: the creation of a language academy. Like many others (including Dryden), he hoped that a body of eminent writers could render judgment on questions of usage; their reputations would be so great as to fix the language in place. Swift had a model in mind: the French and Italians had recently created their own academies (which we will meet in later chapters).
The later part of Swift’s eighteenth century saw two figures emerge who would become the progenitors of two great traditions, though the labels “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” did not exist yet. One was Samuel Johnson, the writer of the first great English dictionary; the other was Robert Lowth, the first bestselling English grammarian.
Today, Johnson is widely known and admired, while Lowth is barely known. Every student of the history of English learns that Johnson wrote a bestselling dictionary that set the standard for modern lexicography, even though his methods were sometimes unorthodox (he famously defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”). Johnson also had the luxury of a talented biographer, a literary star in his own right, James Boswell.
Johnson recognized in his dictionary’s preface that, contrary to Swift’s hope, language could never be frozen in place, no matter how many great writers insisted on this or that usage. Johnson himself drew on the great writers—most of his dictionary entries cite just a handful of sources, including Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible. But despite drawing on the greatest authorities possible, he wrote that his intention was “not to form, but register the language.” He recognized explicitly that the language couldn’t be frozen. Johnson therefore wouldn’t be surprised today that spelling, punctuation, word usage, grammar, and punctuation have all changed quite a bit in the centuries since he wrote, even as his efforts helped slow down some of that change. Though it’s true that Johnson sometimes seemed to feel that the language was in decline, he didn’t rail against it with Swift’s anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example.
Lowth was a different creature. He was educated at an elite school and studied at New College, Oxford, quickly distinguishing himself in religious scholarship. He published a new translation of the Old Testament book of Isaiah and ran in a circle of authors who were taking a new interest in the Middle Eastern languages (including the Hebrew of the Old Testament). Lowth and his fellow scholars would become a set of pre-Romantic Romantics, who looked to find the “genius” of languages that represented the spirit of their peoples. He would rise through the Church’s ranks, through the position of bishop of Oxford, to become bishop of London, and would have become archbishop of Canterbury but for his ill health.
His work A Short Introduction to English Grammar, written while he was at Oxford, was an unlikely hit. It appeared anonymously in 1762, was subsequently reprinted every year or two until 1838, and influenced many grammarians after him. Some would even copy his rules word for word
Lowth’s title page bears a quotation from Cicero, reading (tellingly, in Latin):
Speaking Latin properly is indeed to be held in the highest regard—not just because of its own merits, but in fact because it has been neglected by the masses. For it is not so much noble to know Latin as it is disgraceful not to know it.
Lowth then redoubles the point. In his introduction, he asks “Does … the English language, as it is spoken by the politest part of the nation, and as it stands in the writings of the most approved authors, often [offend] against every part of grammar? Thus far, I am afraid, the charge is true.… Our best authors have committed gross mistakes, for want of a due knowledge of English grammar.” Note that he even does his exemplar Cicero one better: not just the masses, but even “our best authors” commit “gross mistakes.”
With this, Lowth lays the cornerstone of the prescriptivist tradition: that the rules are the rules, standing above actual practice. Who cares how “the politest part of the nation” speaks? Who cares what “our best authors” write? The rules are to be drawn from foreign languages, deduced from logic, or simply declared ex nihilo. The language was, thenceforth, to be shaped by sticklers and their grammars, not by the users (even the finest users) themselves.
Lowth’s method was to instruct by “false syntax,” taking examples from “our best authors’ ” offenses against proper grammar. The King James Bible, one might expect, could be exempt from this clergyman’s criticism. The 1611 translation, by a committee of some of England’s greatest scholars and writers, is still considered by many to be the finest volume of written English in history. But Lowth is unafraid to criticize even one of its best-known passages. The very first words of the Lord’s Prayer contain a mistake, according to him: “Our father, which art in Heaven …” For Lowth, “which” can refer only to inanimate objects and “who” is required for persons (including the Supreme Being); it must be “who art in Heaven.”
Shakespeare, too, falls short of Lowth’s standards: “the lab’ring heart / who in the conflict that it holds with death, attracts the same for aidance ’gainst th enemy” (from Henry VI) should be “the heart which,” writes Lowth. And on and on, with many other examples of bad English from the finest writer in the history of the language. Nor were the Bard and the Bible special targets. The good bishop also shows where John Addison, Milton, Alexander Pope, Dryden, Swift, John Locke, and the Anglican Church’s liturgy offend against his rules.
Never did it occur to Lowth that the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare were more than a hundred and fifty years old as he criticized them. Nor did it ever bother him, as he found “errors” one after another from the pens of the greatest writers, that perhaps they were right and he was wrong. For Lowth, the rules were simply obvious outgrowths of logic. There was no room for variation or change, because he was not describing the language as it exists but telling the language how it should be. The modern reader, meanwhile, is charmed by the things Lowth solemnly prescribes as proper English but that have now utterly fallen out of usage. For Lowth, “gat,” “brake,” “clave,” “spake,” “sware,” “tare,” “weare,” “trode,” and “crope” were the past-tense forms of “get,” “break,” “cleave,” “speak,” “swear,” “tear,” “wear,” “tread,” and “creep.” He was successful but not invincible; those forms had already begun to disappear by his time.
Lowth repeated Dryden’s proscription of the preposition at the end of a sentence, “an idiom, which our language is strongly inclined to.” It’s not clear whether he was being funny in using the idiom itself in the act of prohibiting it. (Modern writers do this sometimes for humor, but Lowth doesn’t do his own “false syntax,” and he isn’t intentionally funny elsewhere.) He recognizes that people end sentences with prepositions “in common conversation” but thinks that the practice should be banned from formal writing, singling out Locke for writing “We are still much at a loss, who civil power belongs to” and Shakespeare for “Who servest thou under?” (Also, that should be whom.)
Lowth pronounces another famous rule with a dubious logic: the ban on the double negative. The double negative was, even in Lowth’s time, not common in educated standard English. But it was common in many dialects and in everyday English, and it had even been standard in earlier eras. Lowth proscribes it, however, with an appeal to a quasi-mathematical logic: “Two negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative.” But there is no reason that this is necessarily so. Chaucer and Shakespeare used it. French uses two negative particles, ne and pas (Je ne sais pas, “I don’t know”). Languages from Spanish to Russian require the negative pronoun to go with a negated verb (No tengo nada, “I don’t have nothing,” and Nichevo ne znaiu, “I don’t know nothing”). But the double negative, already in decline in English by Lowth’s time, was finished off (at least in polite circles) by his disapproval. Today, teachers can still be heard telling pupils that “I don’t know nothing” means “I know something.” Though most have never heard of Lowth, they are echoing his centuries-old, faulty logic.
Another kind of doubling would also attract his ire: double comparisons (including the double superlative). Shakespeare wrote of “the most unkindest cut of all” in Julius Caesar, and the King James translators of the Acts of the Apostles wrote “after the most straitest sect of our religion.” Once again, the writers who used those phrases saw them, like the double negative, as an option, providing extra reinforcement. No, it’s not logically possible to be straighter than the straightest, but poets (and ordinary speakers) often like to play with logic. It’s one of the possibilities that language gives us. But for Lowth, the greatest writers of the language were wrong and the bishop of Oxford was right. Lowth’s disapproval of the double comparative hastened its decline and death in modern English.
Lowth’s tone and methods have several hallmarks. One, as we have seen, is intolerance for change: Lowth seemed surprised that Shakespeare wrote differently in 1600 than Lowth thought proper in 1762. A second Lowthian trait is an appeal to a kind of logic that resembles mathematics; that two negative words in a sentence must result in a positive meaning. (The possibility that they might reinforce each other eludes him.) Finally, Lowth, like many sticklers to follow him, was simply unwilling to accept variation as a fact of language. Though double negatives were common in many people’s speech, for Lowth, there must be only one correct way. Poetic forms such as “most straitest” were to be shouted down. The rules were just the rules.
Though Lowth’s own book was a bestseller, he multiplied his influence with his mark on another grammar-book writer, Lindley Murray. Born in America (the Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan bears his family’s name), Murray moved to England in his later years, and the English Grammar he published there would quickly become a phenomenon in both countries. Published in 1795, it went through twenty-one editions in Britain and twice as many in America in just eleven years. His repetition of Lowth’s rules helped carve many of them in stone. He reiterated the double-negative rule and corrected his predecessor on the sentence-ending preposition rule, saying that this was an idiom “to which our language is strongly inclined.” He even made his example sentences morally as well as grammatically uplifting, saying (in the third person) that he
wishes to promote in some degree, the cause of virtue, as well as of learning; and with this view, he has been studious, through the whole of the work, not only to avoid every example and illustration which might have an improper effect on the minds of youth, but also to introduce, on many occasions, such as have a moral and religious tendency.
In this, he was certainly not the first (remember Swift) nor the last (we’ll get back to Lynne Truss) to mix up grammar and morality. A stickler hallmark is that those who speak or write differently can’t be merely wrong; they must be depraved, too.
The nineteenth-century saw Lowth’s and Murray’s influence spread, through an explosion in books on grammar and usage that they heavily influenced. What began as a trickle in the mid-1700s was a tidal wave a century later. Britain was democratizing; the United States was a vulnerable young republic. Both began to promote universal education, believing that an educated citizenry was the strength of a nation. Unfortunately, this “education” often included the made-up grammar rules stemming from the likes of Lowth and Murray.
It was in the nineteenth century that another famous non-rule appeared. The first prohibition against the split infinitive occurs in an 1834 article by an author identified only as “P.” After that, increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, a “rule” banning split infinitives began ricocheting from grammar book to grammar book, until every self-conscious English-speaker “knew” that to put a word between “to” and a verb in its infinitive was barbaric.
The split-infinitive rule may represent mindless prescriptivism’s greatest height. It was foreign. (It was almost certainly based on the inability to split infinitives in Latin and Greek, since they consist of one word only.) It had been routinely violated by the great writers in English; one 1931 study found split infinitives in English literature from every century, beginning with the fourteenth-century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, through wrongdoers such as William Tyndale, Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.
Rewording split infinitives can introduce ambiguity: “He failed entirely to comprehend it” can mean he failed entirely, or he comprehended, but not entirely. Only putting “entirely” between “to” and “comprehend” can convey clearly “he comprehended most, but not all.” True, sentences can be reworded to work around the problem (“He failed to comprehend everything”), but there is no reason to do so. While many prescriptive rules falsely claim to improve readability and clarity, this one is worse, introducing a problem that wasn’t there in the first place. Yet as split infinitives in fact became more common, in nineteenth-century writing, condemnations of it grew equally strongly. The idea that “rules” were more important than history, elegance, or actual practice—a zombielike prescriptivism that mindlessly sought out so-called mistakes—held writers and speakers in terror of making them.
Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, things began to change. Interest in the historical development of languages was overturning many old ideas. The philologist William Jones, in the late eighteenth century, had discovered the Indo-European language family. The realization that English and French were related to Persian and Sanskrit upended many cherished notions about the uniqueness of any given language. Knowing that languages so far apart shared an ancestor made people realize just what a contingent, mutable thing any one language was at any one time.
Perhaps as a result, the more thoughtful usage sticklers of the twentieth century took a different tone from their predecessors. They used wit and persuasion, not bare pronouncements, as an aid to teaching people to write, rather than simply reciting mechanical rules. George Bernard Shaw typified this new kind of thinking. He was a linguistic genius who created the ultimate language snob, Henry Higgins. In Pygmalion, Higgins tells Eliza Doolittle that
A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
But for the real-world Shaw, rules were a means to graceful expression, not an end in themselves. In a fury about one brainless prescriptivist, he wrote to a newspaper:
If you do not immediately suppress the person who takes it upon himself to lay down the law almost every day in your columns on the subject of literary composition, I will give up the Chronicle. The man is a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot and a self-advertising duffer. Your fatuous specialist is now beginning to rebuke “second-rate” newspapers for using such phrases as “to suddenly go” and “to boldly say.” I ask you, Sir, to put this man out, without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between “to suddenly go,” “to go suddenly” and “suddenly to go.” Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place.
The most influential stickler of this new, thoughtful breed, however, was not a great literary figure like Shaw. Instead, it was an unlikely former schoolteacher and modestly successful essayist, who only in his last decades wrote the towering usage book that dominated the first half of the twentieth century.
Henry Watson Fowler, born in Kent, England, in 1858, taught at a private school into his middle age. But he was forced to forgo a promotion to housemaster at the school; he explained to his headmaster that he simply couldn’t prepare the boys in his care for their confirmation into the Church of England. He later wrote, “Thirty years ago I thought religious belief true; twenty years ago doubtful; ten years ago false; & now it is (for me, of course) absurd.” Unable to continue his first career, he moved to London, where he lived humbly, writing essays, until moving to the island of Guernsey to write with his younger brother Francis.
In 1906, the two put out a usage book, The King’s English, that, according to The Times of London, “took the world by storm.” Not a grammar book but a manual for better writing, it frowned on Americanisms, vogue new words, circumlocutions, and overuse of Latinate vocabulary. But it did all this in a punchy style that made the book, for those into that kind of thing, a page-turner.
Eight years later, Fowler and his brother enlisted in the army, lying about their ages, at the outbreak of the First World War. But they were given rear-echelon duty that both of them chafed against until they petitioned for release from service. Frank contracted tuberculosis and died; Henry was heartbroken.
As an old man and with some modest fame for the King’s English, he wrote his greatest work; A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, now known to most simply as “Fowler’s.” In the alphabetically organized work, Fowler does everything from specify the pronunciation of words such as “pharaoh” to rule on the grammar and usage controversies of the day. On the split infinitive, his tone was typical:
The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes.… A real s.i. [split infinitive], though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality.
Elsewhere, Fowler equally demolishes other modern shibboleths. Under the headword “Fetishes,” he scorns those who refuse to end sentences with prepositions. He derides the ban on “none” with a plural verb. (“None of us are happy” is fine with him. Most sticklers insist on “None of us is happy.”) Under “Superstitions,” he similarly dispatches those who will not begin a sentence with “and” or “but,” describing the prohibition as an “ungrammatical piece of nonsense.”
More than a printed and bound referee on usage controversies, the Dictionary also continues the work of The King’s English in acerbically offering judgment on how to write better. Fowler’s dislike of clichés and autopilot writing, for example, is clear in the entry on “hackneyed phrases”:
There are thousands for whom the only sound sleep is the sleep of the just, the light at dusk must always be dim, religious; all beliefs are cherished, all confidence is implicit, all ignorance blissful, all isolation splendid, all uncertainty glorious, all voids aching.
The clichés he goes on to condemn include some that today seem quaintly old-fashioned: “balm in Gilead,” “consummation devoutly to be wished,” “curate’s egg,” “in a Pickwickian sense,” “neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring.” His old-fashioned style is on display elsewhere too, for example writing that “Mahomet” is just fine, in response to those who would insist on the more accurate “Mohammed” or “Muhammad” for Islam’s prophet. And he had apparently never met a female pedant: “Men,” he writes, “are as much possessed by the didactic impulse as women by the maternal instinct.”
So why the enduring appeal for such a fusty book? While feistily judgmental, Fowler was a realist. Language changes, he realized, as had his predecessor Johnson (and unlike Swift, who thought it could be stopped). Fowler mourns, for example, that -monger could once be appended to innocent words such as “cheese,” “iron,” and “fish” but had acquired a permanent taint of scandal with “war,” “gossip,” “whore,” and the like. For Fowler it was an unwelcome development. But he saw no point in trying to reverse it; -monger could not be saved. Being aware of the flux of language, he himself would have been surprised to see every one of his judgments remaining valid a hundred years after he wrote The King’s English and eighty after his Dictionary.
Fowler was painfully shy in person. But in his writing he combined confident self-awareness (“We have all of us, except the abnormally stupid, been pedantic humorists in our time”) with an unapologetic habit for prescription. It was this mix of authority and humility that made his usage guide an unparalleled success. The dictionary is still in print, in a third edition, today. And Oxford University Press, its publisher, still gets letters of admiration, and sometimes queries, addressed to H. W. Fowler, who died in 1933.
Fowler was a particularly English type: old-fashioned, tobacco-stained, fond of cricket and of an early-morning swim in the bracingly cold waters of Yorkshire. His American equivalent, in fame though not in intellectual temperament, was an obscure Cornell professor named William Strunk, Jr., who required students in his English composition class to buy a little book that he had self-published.
Strunk’s book was later edited by E. B. White, the novelist best known for Charlotte’s Web. “Strunk and White,” formally known as The Elements of Style, is far slimmer than Fowler’s Dictionary. But on American shores, it is far bigger in the public imagination. The Elements of Style has been in print continually since 1959 and is estimated to have sold more than 10 million copies. In 2005 an illustrated edition was published. The book was set to music by a composer named Nico Muhly, and hundreds went to see it performed at the New York Public Library. Wendy Wasserstein borrowed the title for Elements of Style, a novel about New York’s nervous days following the September 11 terror attacks. And in 2009, to mark its fiftieth anniversary, Elements was reissued in a leatherbound, gold-embossed edition.
What about a usage book makes it seem like a lifeline, a guide to the perplexed, a Bible? A clue is given by White: he tells us in the introduction that Will Strunk never seemed to entertain doubt. His commands were issued as if by a sergeant to his platoon: “Do not join independent clauses by a comma.” “Do not break sentences in two.” “Use the active voice.” “Omit needless words.” Many of Elements’ readers, apprehensive about their language ability, craved authority. Strunk provided it to his Cornell students, and White passed it on to millions of readers.
But Elements of Style used this forcefulness in ways that were sometimes useful, sometimes odd. While Fowler had disdained obsession with the small things, Strunk often seems not to know what, exactly, is small. The first rule of his revered book? “Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ’s … whatever the final consonant”—except, for some reason unexplained by Strunk, ancient names such as Jesus and Moses. No justification is given for this exception for the ancients or for the rule at all. There it is, simply pronounced, leading The Elements of Style’s first page.
Surely a more important rule of composition, grammar, or style would begin any book being published in the twenty-first century: shirt-collar-grabbing stuff this is not. But that is the odd little book that is Elements. Its treasured commandments include leaving enough space at the top of a title page for editors’ instructions to typesetters; using generous left-hand margins for notes; writing “August 9th” when the author is using the date but spelling it out in a quotation, as in “I come home on August ninth”; and many other trivia that have more to do with an idiosyncratic house format than with crucial rules of grammar, much less style.
Elsewhere, Strunk and White make other odd choices: “which” is said to be for “nonrestrictive” clauses, while “that” introduces “restrictive” clauses:
The lawnmower that is broken is over there.
versus
The lawnmower, which is broken, is over there.
The first is meant to specify which lawn mower (the broken one); the second presumes that the reader knows which lawn mower is being discussed and adds the fact that it is broken by the by.
This is given by Strunk and White as another of those rules that simply is, without need for justification. But commas, supported by context, actually do all of the crucial work here, so the rule is not needed for clarity. In speech, intonation would convey the same information as the commas. And as Strunk and White note, the restrictive “which” is common throughout English history: the King James translators and Shakespeare both use it. (Nonrestrictive “that” crops up too, mainly in nineteenth-century literature, but is less common.) White, furthermore, proves that restrictive “which” is just fine—by writing it more than once in his other works, such as in his own essay “Death of a Pig”:
… the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar.
Leaving grammar aside, Strunk and White condemn many word choices that grate on their ears. They seem to think that “claim” can’t be used to assert the truth of a statement: Germany can claim Alsace-Lorraine, but a partygoing loudmouth can’t claim he speaks French. This is typical of the kind of oddball rule that pops up in the book and probably originated with Strunk.
White adds a semifamous bugbear of his own. He, and generations of pedants after him, claim (sorry) that “hopefully” can be used to mean only “in a hopeful way” and not in a sentence such as “Hopefully I’ll arrive on Tuesday.” This is despite the existence of many other so-called “sentence adverbs,” which work just like “hopefully”:
Frankly, he’s dissembling.
Honestly, he’s a liar.
Seriously, he’s a doofus.
All three would be absurdities if adverbs were required to refer to the grammatical subject. But obviously, they don’t: they convey the writer’s or speaker’s own attitude. Most of these other sentence adverbs have never been condemned, but for some reason, Elements condemns “hopefully” with special force.
White’s editor noticed that some of the little book’s provisions seemed arbitrary. But White held his ground. For example, Elements of Style holds that “like” comes before nouns and pronouns. (“He smells like fish.”) “As,” by contrast, comes before phrases and clauses. (“He smells like fish, as you would expect from a fishmonger.”) Never, so they thought, could you write “He smells like fish, like you would expect from a fishmonger.” His editor thought this rule idiosyncratic to Strunk and White and wondered if it was really needed in the book. White clenched his jaw and held firm, and it was kept.
Having taken Strunk’s pet peeves and added many of his own, delivering them with the voice of God, White was surprised at some of the reactions to the book when it was published. Who were these picky and annoying letter writers, pointing out “errors” that he had forgotten to condemn? He wrote a friend:
Life as a textbook editor is not the rosy dream you laymen think it is. I get the gaa [sic] damnedest letters every day from outraged precisionists and comma snatchers, complaining every inch of the way.
One letter writer was worked up by a new and vogue usage, “to dress up.” White politely responded that he thought it was just fine, saying that there was an important difference between “to dress” and “to dress up.” But on what basis could White condemn “hopefully” while accepting the new extension of “to dress”? We never find out. Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions.
On writing style itself, Strunk and White issued two commands that are indeed usually best followed; the famous “Omit needless words!” and the instruction to use the active voice rather than the passive. But the form of the book itself—command after command, in contrast to Fowler’s lofty mode of humorous and erudite persuasion—means that this advice has been passed down as holy injunction, rather than good guidance. (The influence of Strunk and White’s inflexibility on the passive voice can be seen in the fact that many versions of Microsoft Word, a computer program that doesn’t even understand language, automatically condemn the passive voice.) The fault isn’t entirely Strunk’s, for penning a hodgepodge of writing advice, grammar prejudices, and personal gripes for his students; nor White’s, for adding a gloss and popularizing it. It is those who have treated Elements of Style like a sacred book, rather than the occasionally handy bit of idiosyncratic guidance that it is. People crave a hard linguistic hand, with no tolerance for variation. Strunk and White gave it to them.
There is really only one way to learn good writing: through good reading and extensive writing and revising. If students in college and high school are exposed to high-quality, well-edited writing year after year, some will develop into competent and even good writers. Many will not. But writing is, ultimately, an artistic skill, not the mechanistic application of rules, something that Fowler realized. Fowler’s great redactor, Ernest Gowers, wrote of his hero that “the prime mover of his moralizing was not so much grammatical Grundyism as the instincts of a craftsman.” However, for Strunk, baseless rules (which include never using “however” at the beginning of a sentence to mark a transition with some contrast, as this sentence does) needed to be shouted crisply. Perhaps Strunk thought that he knew when to break them but that all other writers had to be treated like incompetent freshmen. Though Strunk and White occasionally admit that language changes and rules can be broken, the forceful tone of their field manual has been better remembered than their occasional nods to flexibility and change.
And so we return to Lynne Truss. Fowler began the century with his careful, witty usage dictionary; Strunk passed the baton to White in midcentury, and advice became commands. By the turn of the twenty-first century, there was little new to be said about grammar, punctuation, or usage. So the best way to get attention was to pass on the old rules louder and more irately than ever before. And here we return to our theme: the politics behind the claim that language is going to hell in a handbasket on greased wheels these days.
How might we gather that Truss is concerned about more than just punctuation? The first thing we might look for is someone not overly shy about making statements that are flatly false. And sure enough, near the beginning of her furious little volume, she says that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught in the majority of English schools.” if that was true wed expect that nearly everything written by people educated in england in the last few decades too look like this but it doesnt seem to be so Mistakes may be more common than Truss would like, but to say that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught” in most schools beggars belief.
A bit later on, Truss again enjoys the indulgence of the story that is simply too good to check: “There is a rumour that in parts of the Civil Service workers have been pragmatically instructed to omit apostrophes because no one knows how to use them anymore.” This simply doesn’t pass the laugh test. Sure, we get the weasel-worded introduction “There is a rumour,” and of course some civil servants are incompetent writers. But the scene of a department head telling her staff, “Okay, everyone, it’s time to stop using apostrophes—it’s simply too much of a bother” is surely more urban legend than even rumor. Truss’s own success in Britain as well as America reminds us that every office has at least one of her beloved sticklers, who would throw an almighty fit at any such injunction.
Truss goes on to describe her early days as a stickler in a passage that speaks volumes.
While other girls were out with boyfriends on Sunday afternoons, getting their necks disfigured by love bites, I was at home with the wireless listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called Many a Slip, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose. It was a fantastic programme. I dream sometimes they have brought it back. Panelists such as Isobel Barnett and David Nixon would interrupt Roy Plomley with a buzz and say “tautology!” Around this same time, when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions, I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime. (It has.) Funny how I didn’t think any of this was peculiar at the time, when it was behaviour with “Proto Stickler” written all over it.
What’s going on here? “Tautology” isn’t a grammar error; it’s a logical one, with either unnecessary reinforcement in a phrase (“free gift,” also called a pleonasm) or a statement written so that it can’t be falsified, for example by definition or circular logic. Think of Yogi Berra’s “You can observe a lot by watching.”
This isn’t nitpicking (although one could be forgiven for picking the nits off of the self-appointed world-beating nitpicker). It shows a major problem in many people’s thinking about language errors: category error.
“Grammar,” to the language specialist, is how words and sentences are built from meaningful components. It describes how nouns are made plural or verbs put into the past tense; how individual words can be bolted together into phrases, clauses, and sentences that obey the rules of syntax.
But for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, “grammar.” And in the popular imagination Truss typifies and electrifies, “grammar” always gives one and only one correct answer to any question. This is the distillation of Strunk’s ethos: say it loud, show no doubt, and never, ever change your mind.
Admittedly, Truss says her book is about punctuation, not grammar. But from the “tautology” mistake, it seems she isn’t quite sure what grammar is anyway or doesn’t much care. The important thing she wants you to take away is that she cares obsessively for the Rules, whatever they are.
What about the political content of Truss’s fury? It seems too obvious to be accidental that Truss mentions—not once but twice—sex and its consequences. She was learning punctuation while “other girls … were getting their necks disfigured by love bites” and reading Partridge while “other girls … were having abortions.” When Truss mentions the years of her schooling—1966 to 1973—we finally see our culprit. It is the 1960s and all that went with it: free love, rebellion, drugs, protest, permissiveness, even the poor Isle of Wight Festival. It was the end of the sure and simple world of the 1950s, when the scariest thing around was Elvis’s pelvis. It was unsettling even for those who enjoyed it. And for those who like certainty, it must have been pretty hard indeed.
Once life was simple, and there were rules, by God. Then the kids started putting flowers in their hair and occupying the universities. After that, the teachers got so scared that they threw out the rulebooks, started teaching “free writing,” and saying “Express yourselves.” Now nobody knows the bleeding difference between its and it’s. The great majority of English schools simply do not teach grammar or punctuation.
The idea that there was once an age when people knew better crops up again and again in prescriptive rants. Truss betrays this with temporal phrases. “The disappearance of punctuation (including word spacing, capital letters and so on) indicates an enormous shift in our attitude to the written word, and nobody knows where it will end.” (Emphasis added.) Truss doesn’t spell out when exactly it was that people once worshiped the written word and punctuation was sacrosanct. But if this chapter has taught you anything, it is that no such period ever existed. To be sure, we can point to exam questions from turn-of-the-twentieth-century schools that seem to indicate that once every boy and girl got a frighteningly thorough education in grammar and writing. But this is misleading. At the turn of the twentieth century, few boys and girls actually got this education; many still lived in the countryside and skipped school to help their parents in the fields. Others, in the cities, dropped out to take factory jobs as soon as they were able. In both Britain and America, illiteracy is actually far lower today than in the past, not higher.
Illiteracy among the population 14 years of age and older in the United States. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, at http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp.
A hundred and forty years ago, one in five Americans was illiterate. Now less than one in a hundred is—and this fall began during a hundred years of “separate but equal” dismal schools for blacks in America. In Britain, illiteracy is rarer still. It may be true that formal grammar was taught more extensively in good schools in the past. But the notion that once upon a time, every schoolboy was an H. W. Fowler, every schoolgirl a perfectly punctuating Lynne Truss, but today no one can put two words together simply holds no water. Where is the former golden age of the written word?
But never, as the hack journalist says, let the facts get in the way of a good story. Truss and her followers, and their many predecessors over the centuries, want to enrage, not educate. Language is in terminal decline! Soon we will not be able to write at all, or perhaps even speak!
This isn’t true, just as it wasn’t when Swift said the same in 1712. But “declinism” sells; it sells political books, and it sells politically tinged language books. It is telling that Truss’s follow-up book was not on educational reform or remedying inequality. It was Talk to the Hand, on the decline of manners—another New York Times bestseller.
Not only is declinism not new, as hundreds of years of examples show. It is not particular to the Anglophone world, either. Not only have English and American schoolmarms worried about “kids these days” for centuries. Similar concerns have nagged speakers of languages around the world throughout recorded history.
Cicero was the most famous grouch of the Latin age. He said that standards of knowledge of Latin were “disgraceful.” He groused that nobody was pronouncing certain words correctly anymore. But even he knew he couldn’t do anything about it: “at some point, and it was late, since the truth was wrenched out of me by the chatter in my ears, I relinquished to the people the custom of speaking, I reserved the knowledge [of correct grammar and pronunciation] to myself.” Cicero was right to worry; Latin was “declining,” if you can call it that—into modern French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and the other Romance languages.
Another theme that we’ve seen among declinists in the Anglophone world also crops up globally. This is the notion that generations ago, even simple folk spoke or wrote better than the most cultivated people today. While today’s grouches worry that no one knows how to distinguish “who” and “whom,” endings that mark case (like “whom,” which signifies an object rather than a subject) often disappear from languages over time. To the sticklers, this common process always looks like disintegration from an earlier, happier time when everyone knew the endings. Change is always disintegration. Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), known by most for his work with his brother collecting fairy tales, was actually a philologist. He was no Germanic grammar grouch, as he understood that language changed naturally. But even he regretted that German had lost so many grammatical endings, writing nostalgically that
In reading carefully the old Teutonic sources, I was every day discovering forms and perfections that we generally envy the Greeks and Romans when we consider the present condition of our language.… Six hundred years ago every rustic knew, that is to say practiced daily, perfections and niceties in the German language of which the best grammarians nowadays do not even dream.
But one nostalgic’s “perfections and niceties” of an earlier age are simply another’s outdated, unnecessary endings of a bygone era. German had no “golden age,” at least not any more than English did. Language just changed.
Declinism isn’t limited to the speakers of classical or “sophisticated” European languages. Nonwritten languages change even faster than those with a written tradition. Printing and writing, dictionaries and grammar books slow—though they can’t stop—language change. So oral cultures might have even more reason to worry about “kids these days” than cultures with a written heritage. Wolof, a widespread West African language used by many nonnatives to communicate when they don’t share a native language, may be losing some of its sixteen genders. (You might have thought German was complicated with three, but many languages have far more obligatory noun classes than the European languages do. Though they have little to do with sex, linguists call these genders, a word related to “genre.”) Because of the large numbers of nonnatives who can’t learn all sixteen genders, many “kids these days” hear, and thus learn, Wolof without them. This doesn’t mean that Wolof is in decline. And in fact, in nonliterate societies, you hear less declinism than in literate ones. But linguists nonetheless do report hearing parents complain about the language of the kids, whether by ordinary change, mixture with another language, or some other garden-variety phenomenon.
This isn’t as common as it is in more literate societies, of course. The existence of written grammars—not to mention modern systems of education that pound those grammars into students’ heads—creates a class of people with a strong incentive to showcase their education by complaining that they’ve mastered difficult rules others can’t seem to grasp. But the fact that field linguists even occasionally find related, stickler-like attitudes among nonliterate societies too should give the modern American or British declinist some perspective. Every language is always changing; it simply can’t be true that they are all in decline.
One of the nastiest things to do in an argument is impugn another’s motives and to claim you know what someone else really means. So let me finish this with a tip of the hat to the many sticklers I have disagreed sharply with in this chapter.
Fowler’s magisterial rulings speak not only for their author’s erudition but for his passion. His willingness to slaughter sacred cows such as the split-infinitive rule should be emulated by every self-appointed grammar curmudgeon. Strunk’s rather more wild-eyed ways—especially the insistence on keeping his advice so terse that it did not allow for thoughtful discussion—shows us a man who saw a language he loves mauled by too many college students. (And this a hundred years ago, further demolishing the notion of some kind of past golden age of linguistic perfection.) E. B. White was a fine writer who was right to occasionally violate the edicts he ordered others to follow in Elements of Style. Even Truss’s zesty writing, when she stays away from violent revenge fantasies, makes it perfectly clear that she enjoys putting words on a page. As for Bishop Lowth, who bequeathed us some of the most unkillable stupidities of English grammar teaching, I struggle to find many kind words for him. I suppose he did produce a fine translation of Isaiah, and I hope his Hebrew grammar instincts were better than his English ones.
The point of all this is to put prescriptivism—from the elegant Fowler to the hyperventilating Truss—into some perspective, historical and global. What is today English is the descendant of a dialect almost randomly chosen; had King Alfred the Great not moved his capital to London, we would be writing in an unrecognizably different Wessex-derived dialect today. Today’s English writing conventions were made up piecemeal over centuries. Those rules change, just as “silly” no longer means “innocent” as it did centuries ago. Educational standards may drop, and slightly fewer people may be skilled at using the written conventions of the standard dialect than at some point in the past. But then again, most people will never be skilled writers anyway, ever, for the main reason that they don’t need to be. Elegant use of written English simply isn’t needed for most people’s daily lives. As Truss noticed in school, there are, after all, sex, music, and a whole host of other things to spend time on. It is people who are decent writers themselves who, strangely, discover that mastery of written mechanics is the ultimate coin of human worth.
And yes, there is a political content to this idea too. It is the politics of an aggrieved conservatism, standing against youth, minorities, and change. We have seen declinism across the centuries and across cultures. But for today’s declinists, the point of departure seems particularly sudden and stark. It is usually only hinted at but sometimes said quite explicitly that the world was better before the 1960s. That happens to correspond with challenges to authority of all kinds: the liberation of women, the rise of youth culture, and sexual autonomy for most people, something many conservatives have still not gotten their heads around. It is also the era of the civil rights movement in America, the beginnings of nonwhite immigration to Britain, and whole hosts of things that polite people don’t criticize directly.
When criticism of these ultimately positive upheavals didn’t seem the right thing to do, those who were unsettled found innocent victims to defend. The music just didn’t sound like music anymore. Drugs were addling a promising generation. Crime was beginning to turn “downtown” into “the inner city.” And the language itself was increasingly mangled, as teachers were afraid to teach and kids were emboldened to refuse to learn.
For racial minorities, language played a cruel role in their incomplete emancipation. Minority groups have always struggled hardest to master the standard language. Either they suffered hundreds of years of the most depraved discrimination (blacks in America) or they come from foreign-language backgrounds and poverty, are stuck in poor schools, and are the victims of racism upon arrival.
Standard languages are both a tool for and a weapon against these groups. Those minority-group members who learn the standard are praised as “articulate,” are seen as successfully integrated, and have a fast track to the top. Everyone loves an underdog success story. But those who don’t master the standard—because they speak a different home dialect (many black Americans), go to bad schools (most racial minorities in the West), or come from a different language background (recent immigrants and their kids)—have a hard road already. And racism against them is too easily hidden behind, and justified by, the criticism that “they just don’t know how to speak correctly.” If we recognize that they simply come from different dialect or language communities, this problem takes on a different hue: the task of teaching people who have slipped off the social ladder to get their feet back on the rungs—through standard English.
So by all means, learn and cherish the rules of standard written English. It has a great history and binds together disparate groups in a society. This book is written in it, by someone who loves language too. But it’s useful because it works, not because its arbitrary rules are somehow sacrosanct. Some rules are silly. Some vary over time. Some vary by place. Some are matters of house style. And some are disputed.
Of the rules that remain, those that are widely accepted as part of the standard language, some are obvious. (No child above the age of four needs to be taught that the past tense of “I am” is “I was.”) Some are not. (Many educated people can’t use “whom,” and it may be passing out of the language.) And in the case of punctuation and mechanics, the rules are mainly not even grammar, strictly speaking. Punctuation is there to make writing easier to read, not to appease angry language gods.
Sometimes even Truss seems to agree:
What happens when [punctuation] isn’t used? Well, if punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead. And if you take the courtesy analogy, a sentence no longer holds the door open for you to walk in, but drops in your face as you approach.
That’s more like it: bad punctuation as loose stitching, bungled traffic signals, or, perhaps the best metaphor, discourtesy. The conventions of any language, and especially the written conventions, are not a matter of good versus evil, the saved and the damned, or Christ and Antichrist on the plain of Megiddo. They are simply conventions, and useful ones at that. Lynne Truss seems, in her less operatic moments, to know this. But such a reasonable tone wouldn’t have sold quite so many books.
* As Wallace had it, the derivation was from “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks of Our Time,” depending on whether the speaker was a SNOOT or not. Sprachgefühl is German for “language feel” or “sense for language.”