The Gift Of Language

[Andre Cramblit]

City Journal Home.  	City Journal
The Gift of Language
No, Dr. Pinker, it’s not just from nature.
Theodore Dalrymple
Autumn 2006

Now that I’ve retired early from medical practice in a slum hospital  
and the prison next door, my former colleagues sometimes ask me, not  
without a trace of anxiety, whether I think that I made the right  
choice or whether I miss my previous life. They are good friends and  
fine men, but it is only human nature not to wish unalloyed happiness  
to one who has chosen a path that diverges, even slightly, from one’s  
own.

Fortunately, I do miss some aspects of my work: if I didn’t, it would  
mean that I had not enjoyed what I did for many years and had wasted  
a large stretch of my life. I miss, for instance, the sudden  
illumination into the worldview of my patients that their replies to  
simple questions sometimes gave me. I still do a certain amount of  
medico-legal work, preparing psychiatric reports on those accused of  
crimes, and recently a case reminded me of how sharply a few words  
can bring into relief an entire attitude toward life and shed light  
on an entire mental hinterland.

A young woman was charged with assault, under the influence of  
alcohol and marijuana, on a very old lady about five times her age.  
Describing her childhood, the young accused mentioned that her mother  
had once been in trouble with the police.

“What for?” I asked.

“She was on the Social [Security] and working at the same time.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“She had to give up working.” The air of self-evidence with which she  
said this revealed a whole world of presuppositions. For her, and  
those around her, work was the last resort; economic dependence on  
state handouts was the natural condition of man.

I delighted in what my patients said. One of them always laced his  
statements with proverbs, which he invariably mangled. “Sometimes,  
doctor,” he said to me one day, “I feel like the little boy with his  
finger in the dike, crying wolf.” And I enjoyed the expressive argot  
of prison. The prison officers, too, had their own language. They  
called a loquacious prisoner “verbal” if they believed him to be mad,  
and “mouthy” if they believed him to be merely bad and willfully  
misbehaving.

Brief exchanges could so entertain me that on occasion they  
transformed duty into pleasure. Once I was called to the prison in  
the early hours to examine a man who had just tried to hang himself.  
He was sitting in a room with a prison officer. It was about three in  
the morning, the very worst time to be roused from sleep.

“The things you have to do for Umanity, sir,” said the prison officer  
to me.

The prisoner, looking bemused, said to him, “You what?”

“U-manity,” said the prison officer, turning to the prisoner. “You’re  
Uman, aren’t you?”

It was like living in a glorious comic passage in Dickens.

For the most part, though, I was struck not by the verbal felicity  
and invention of my patients and those around them but by their  
inability to express themselves with anything like facility: and this  
after 11 years of compulsory education, or (more accurately)  
attendance at school.

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least  
to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with  
conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they  
were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with  
expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion.  
Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put  
things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly.  
Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching  
the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in  
a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least  
without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most  
abstractions were closed to them.

In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a  
disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public  
bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and  
health care to their income and the education of their children. I  
would find myself dealing on their behalf with those bureaucracies,  
which were often simultaneously bullying and incompetent; and what  
officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible  
suddenly, on my intervention, became possible within a week. Of  
course, it was not my mastery of language alone that produced this  
result; rather, my mastery of language signaled my capacity to make  
serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do as I asked. I  
do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those  
bureaucracies were increasingly installing security barriers against  
the physical attacks on the staff by enraged but inarticulate  
dependents.

All this, it seems to me, directly contradicts our era’s ruling  
orthodoxy about language. According to that orthodoxy, every child,  
save the severely brain-damaged and those with very rare genetic  
defects, learns his or her native language with perfect facility,  
adequate to his needs. He does so because the faculty of language is  
part of human nature, inscribed in man’s physical being, as it were,  
and almost independent of environment. To be sure, today’s language  
theorists concede that if a child grows up completely isolated from  
other human beings until the age of about six, he will never learn  
language adequately; but this very fact, they argue, implies that the  
capacity for language is “hardwired” in the human brain, to be  
activated only at a certain stage in each individual’s development,  
which in turn proves that language is an inherent biological  
characteristic of mankind rather than a merely cultural artifact.  
Moreover, language itself is always rule-governed; and the rules that  
govern it are universally the same, when stripped of certain minor  
incidentals and contingencies that superficially appear important but  
in reality are not.

It follows that no language or dialect is superior to any other and  
that modes of verbal communication cannot be ranked according to  
complexity, expressiveness, or any other virtue. Thus, attempts to  
foist alleged grammatical “correctness” on native speakers of an  
“incorrect” dialect are nothing but the unacknowledged and oppressive  
exercise of social control—the means by which the elites deprive  
whole social classes and peoples of self-esteem and keep them in  
permanent subordination. If they are convinced that they can’t speak  
their own language properly, how can they possibly feel other than  
unworthy, humiliated, and disenfranchised? Hence the refusal to teach  
formal grammar is both in accord with a correct understanding of the  
nature of language and is politically generous, inasmuch as it  
confers equal status on all forms of speech and therefore upon all  
speakers.

The locus classicus of this way of thinking, at least for laymen such  
as myself, is Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct. A  
bestseller when first published in 1994, it is now in its 25th  
printing in the British paperback version alone, and its wide  
circulation suggests a broad influence on the opinions of the  
intelligent public. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard  
University, and that institution’s great prestige cloaks him, too, in  
the eyes of many. If Professor Pinker were not right on so important  
a subject, which is one to which he has devoted much study and  
brilliant intelligence, would he have tenure at Harvard?

Pinker nails his colors to the mast at once. His book, he says, “will  
not chide you about proper usage . . .” because, after all, “[l] 
anguage is a complex, specialized skill, which . . . is qualitatively  
the same in every individual. . . . Language is no more a cultural  
invention than is upright posture,” and men are as naturally equal in  
their ability to express themselves as in their ability to stand on  
two legs. “Once you begin to look at language . . . as a biological  
adaptation to communicate information,” Pinker continues, “it is no  
longer as tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of  
thought.” Every individual has an equal linguistic capacity to  
formulate the most complex and refined thoughts. We all have, so to  
speak, the same tools for thinking. “When it comes to linguistic  
form,” Pinker says, quoting the anthropologist, Edward Sapir, “Plato  
walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting  
savage of Assam.” To put it another way, “linguistic genius is  
involved every time a child learns his or her mother tongue.”

The old-fashioned and elitist idea that there is a “correct” and  
“incorrect” form of language no doubt explains the fact that “[l] 
inguists repeatedly run up against the myth that working-class  
people . . . speak a simpler and a coarser language. This is a  
pernicious illusion. . . . Trifling differences between the dialect  
of the mainstream and the dialect of other groups . . . are dignified  
as badges of ‘proper grammar.’ ” These are, in fact, the “hobgoblins  
of the schoolmarm,” and ipso facto contemptible. In fact, standard  
English is one of those languages that “is a dialect with an army and  
a navy.” The schoolmarms he so slightingly dismisses are in fact but  
the linguistic arm of a colonial power—the middle class—oppressing  
what would otherwise be a much freer and happier populace. “Since  
prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those  
with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as  
shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble.”

Children will learn their native language adequately whatever anyone  
does, and the attempt to teach them language is fraught with  
psychological perils. For example, to “correct” the way a child  
speaks is potentially to give him what used to be called an  
inferiority complex. Moreover, when schools undertake such  
correction, they risk dividing the child from his parents and social  
milieu, for he will speak in one way and live in another, creating  
hostility and possibly rejection all around him. But happily, since  
every child is a linguistic genius, there is no need to do any such  
thing. Every child will have the linguistic equipment he needs,  
merely by virtue of growing older.

I need hardly point out that Pinker doesn’t really believe anything  
of what he writes, at least if example is stronger evidence of belief  
than precept. Though artfully sown here and there with a demotic  
expression to prove that he is himself of the people, his own book is  
written, not surprisingly, in the kind of English that would please  
schoolmarms. I doubt very much whether it would have reached its 25th  
printing had he chosen to write it in the dialect of rural Louisiana,  
for example, or of the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Even had he  
chosen to do so, he might have found the writing rather difficult. I  
should like to see him try to translate a sentence from his book that  
I have taken at random, “The point that the argument misses is that  
although natural selection involves incremental steps that enhance  
functioning, the enhancements do not have to be an existing module,”  
into the language of the Glasgow or Detroit slums.

In fact, Pinker has no difficulty in ascribing greater or lesser  
expressive virtues to languages and dialects. In attacking the idea  
that there are primitive languages, he quotes the linguist Joan  
Bresnan, who describes English as “a West Germanic language spoken in  
England and its former colonies” (no prizes for guessing the  
emotional connotations of this way of so describing it). Bresnan  
wrote an article comparing the use of the dative in English and  
Kivunjo, a language spoken on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its  
use is much more complex in the latter language than in the former,  
making far more distinctions. Pinker comments: “Among the clever  
gadgets I have glimpsed in the grammars of so-called primitive  
groups, the complex Cherokee pronoun system seems especially handy.  
It distinguishes among ‘you and I,’ ‘another person and I,’ ‘several  
other people and I,’ and ‘you, one or more other persons, and I,’  
which English crudely collapses into the all-purpose pronoun we.” In  
other words, crudity and subtlety are concepts that apply between  
languages. And if so, there can be no real reason why they cannot  
apply within a language—why one man’s usage should not be better,  
more expressive, subtler, than another’s.

Similarly, Pinker attacks the idea that the English of the ghetto,  
Black English Vernacular, is in any way inferior to standard English.  
It is rule- governed like (almost) all other language. Moreover, “If  
the psychologists had listened to spontaneous conversations, they  
would have rediscovered the commonplace fact that American black  
culture is highly verbal; the subculture of street youths in  
particular is famous in the annals of anthropology for the value  
placed on linguistic virtuosity.” But in appearing to endorse the  
idea of linguistic virtuosity, he is, whether he likes it or not,  
endorsing the idea of linguistic lack of virtuosity. And it surely  
requires very little reflection to come to the conclusion that  
Shakespeare had more linguistic virtuosity than, say, the average  
contemporary football player. Oddly enough, Pinker ends his encomium  
on Black English Vernacular with a schoolmarm’s pursed lips: “The  
highest percentage of ungrammatical sentences [are to be] found in  
the proceedings of learned academic conferences.”

Over and over again, Pinker stresses that children do not learn  
language by imitation; rather, they learn it because they are  
biologically predestined to do so. “Let us do away,” he writes, with  
what one imagines to be a rhetorical sweep of his hand, “with the  
folklore that parents teach their children language.” It comes as  
rather a surprise, then, to read the book’s dedication: “For Harry  
and Roslyn Pinker, who gave me language.”

Surely he cannot mean by this that they gave him language in the same  
sense as they gave him hemoglobin—that is to say, that they were  
merely the sine qua non of his biological existence as Steven Pinker.  
If so, why choose language of all the gifts that they gave him?  
Presumably, he means that they gave him the opportunity to learn  
standard English, even if they did not speak it themselves.

It is utterly implausible to suggest that imitation of parents (or  
other social contacts) has nothing whatever to do with the  
acquisition of language. I hesitate to mention so obvious a  
consideration, but Chinese parents tend to have Chinese-speaking  
children, and Portuguese parents Portuguese-speaking ones. I find it  
difficult to believe that this is entirely a coincidence and that  
imitation has nothing to do with it. Moreover, it is a sociological  
truism that children tend to speak not merely the language but the  
dialect of their parents.

Of course, they can escape it if they choose or need to do so: my  
mother, a native German-speaker, arrived in England aged 18 and  
learned to speak standard English without a trace of a German accent  
(which linguists say is a rare accomplishment) and without ever  
making a grammatical mistake. She didn’t imitate her parents,  
perhaps, but she imitated someone. After her recent death, I found  
her notebooks from 1939, in which she painstakingly practiced  
English, the errors growing fewer until there were none. I don’t  
think she would have been favorably impressed by Professor Pinker’s  
disdainful grammatical latitudinarianism—the latitudinarianism that,  
in British schools and universities, now extends not only to grammar  
but to spelling, as a friend of mine discovered recently.

A teacher in a state school gave his daughter a list of spellings to  
learn as homework, and my friend noticed that three out of ten of  
them were wrong. He went to the principal to complain, but she looked  
at the list and asked, “So what? You can tell what the words are  
supposed to mean.” The test for her was not whether the spellings  
were correct but whether they were understandable. So much for the  
hobgoblins of contemporary schoolmarms.

The contrast between a felt and lived reality—in this case, Pinker’s  
need to speak and write standard English because of its superior  
ability to express complex ideas—and the denial of it, perhaps in  
order to assert something original and striking, is characteristic of  
an intellectual climate in which the destruction of moral and social  
distinctions is proof of the very best intentions.

Pinker’s grammatical latitudinarianism, when educationists like the  
principal of my friend’s daughter’s school take it seriously, has the  
practical effect of encouraging those born in the lower reaches of  
society to remain there, to enclose them in the mental world of their  
particular milieu. Of course, this is perfectly all right if you also  
believe that all stations in life are equally good and desirable and  
that there is nothing to be said for articulate reflection upon human  
existence. In other words, grammatical latitudinarianism is the  
natural ideological ally of moral and cultural relativism.

It so happens that I observed the importance of mastering standard,  
schoolmarmly grammatical speech in my own family. My father, born two  
years after his older brother, had the opportunity, denied his older  
brother for reasons of poverty, to continue his education.  
Accordingly, my father learned to speak and write standard English,  
and I never heard him utter a single word that betrayed his origins.  
He could discourse philosophically without difficulty; I sometimes  
wished he had been a little less fluent.

My uncle, by contrast, remained trapped in the language of the slums.  
He was a highly intelligent man and what is more a very good one: he  
was one of those rare men, much less common than their opposite, from  
whom goodness radiated almost as a physical quality. No one ever met  
him without sensing his goodness of heart, his generosity of spirit.

But he was deeply inarticulate. His thoughts were too complex for the  
words and the syntax available to him. All through my childhood and  
beyond, I saw him struggle, like a man wrestling with an invisible  
boa constrictor, to express his far from foolish thoughts—thoughts of  
a complexity that my father expressed effortlessly. The frustration  
was evident on his face, though he never blamed anyone else for it.  
When, in Pinker’s book, I read the transcript of an interview by the  
neuropsychologist Howard Gardner with a man who suffered from  
expressive dysphasia after a stroke—that is to say, an inability to  
articulate thoughts in language—I was, with great sadness, reminded  
of my uncle. Gardner asked the man about his job before he had a stroke.

     “I’m a sig . . . no . . . man . . . uh, well, . . . again.”  
These words were emitted slowly, and with great effort. . . .
     “Let me help you,” I interjected. “You were a signal . . .”
     “A sig-nal man . . . right,” [he] completed my phrase triumphantly.
     “Were you in the Coast Guard?”
     “No, er, yes, yes . . . ship . . . Massachu . . . chusetts . . .  
Coast-guard . . . years.”

It seemed to me that it was a cruel fate for such a man as my uncle  
not to have been taught the standard English that came to come so  
naturally to my father. As Montaigne tells us, there is no torture  
greater than that of a man who is unable to express what is in his soul.

Beginning in the 1950s, Basil Bernstein, a London University  
researcher, demonstrated the difference between the speech of middle-  
and working-class children, controlling for whatever it is that IQ  
measures. Working-class speech, tethered closely to the here and now,  
lacked the very aspects of standard English needed to express  
abstract or general ideas and to place personal experience in  
temporal or any other perspective. Thus, unless Pinker’s despised  
schoolmarms were to take the working-class children in hand and  
deliberately teach them another speech code, they were doomed to  
remain where they were, at the bottom of a society that was itself  
much the poorer for not taking full advantage of their abilities, and  
that indeed would pay a steep penalty for not doing so. An  
intelligent man who can make no constructive use of his intelligence  
is likely to make a destructive, and self-destructive, use of it.

If anyone doubts that inarticulacy can be a problem, I recommend  
reading a report by the Joseph Rowntree Trust about British girls who  
get themselves pregnant in their teens (and sometimes their early  
teens) as an answer to their existential problems. The report is not  
in the least concerned with the linguistic deficiencies of these  
girls, but they are evident in the transcript in every reply to every  
question. Without exception, the girls had had a very painful  
experience of life and therefore much to express from hearts that  
must have been bursting. I give only one example, but it is  
representative. A girl, aged 17, explains why it is wonderful to have  
a baby:

     Maybe it’s just—yeah, because maybe just—might be (um) it just  
feels great when—when like, you’ve got a child who just— you know— 
following you around, telling you they love you and I think that’s— 
it’s quite selfish, but that’s one of the reasons why I became a mum  
because I wanted someone who’ll—you know—love ’em to bits ’cos it’s  
not just your child who’s the centre of your world, and that feels  
great as well, so I think—it’s brilliant. It is fantastic because—you  
know—they’re—the child’s dependent on you and you know that (um)—  
that you—if you—you know—you’ve gotta do everything for the child and  
it just feels great to be depended on.

As I know from the experience of my patients, there is no reason to  
expect her powers of expression to increase spontaneously with age.  
Any complex abstractions that enter her mind will remain inchoate,  
almost a nuisance, like a fly buzzing in a bottle that it cannot  
escape. Her experience is opaque even to herself, a mere jumble from  
which it will be difficult or impossible to learn because, for  
linguistic reasons, she cannot put it into any kind of perspective or  
coherent order.

I am not of the ungenerous and empirically mistaken party that writes  
off such people as inherently incapable of anything better or as  
already having achieved so much that it is unnecessary to demand  
anything else of them, on the grounds that they naturally have more  
in common with Shakespeare than with speechless animal creation. Nor,  
of course, would I want everyone to speak all the time in Johnsonian  
or Gibbonian periods. Not only would it be intolerably tedious, but  
much linguistic wealth would vanish. But everyone ought to have the  
opportunity to transcend the limitations of his linguistic  
environment, if it is a restricted one—which means that he ought to  
meet a few schoolmarms in his childhood. Everyone, save the  
handicapped, learns to run without being taught; but no child runs  
100 yards in nine seconds, or even 15 seconds, without training. It  
is fatuous to expect that the most complex of human faculties,  
language, requires no special training to develop it to its highest  
possible power.