In Defense of Common English

Wed Apr 22 22:35:09 UTC 2009

In Defense of Common English

By BEN YAGODA

Not long ago, I took part in a panel discussion at the Free Library of
Philadelphia. My fellow panelists were two linguists and a
lexicographer. Anyone who knows any linguists and lexicographers will
be unsurprised to hear that their position on usage was descriptive
rather than prescriptive: They were interested in charting and
interpreting recent and historical changes in the way English is
written and spoken, not interested in labeling those changes as
"mistakes," and even less interested in decrying such so-called errors
as evidence of a decline in American civilization. At the end of our
conversation, there was time for questions from the sizable audience.
The first questioner stood up and said (I paraphrase), "It always
drives me crazy when people use 'impact' as a verb. How can we abolish
that?" The panelists hemmed and hawed, murmuring sweet nothings like
"the language changes" and "functional shifting."

Questioner No. 2 said, "My thing is when people use 'they' as a
singular — like, 'Everyone should have their eyes examined once a
year.'" Actually, there was no question: The audience member merely
stared at the panelists, expecting universal tsk-tsking and rueful
shaking of heads. But she wasn't about to get any love from this
group. One of the linguists pointed out, as gently as possible, that
there was nothing wrong with using "they" that way, that in fact it
made perfect sense — as writers from Jane Austen to the authors of the
King James Version of the Bible had realized — and that the
prohibition against it was the legacy of a small group of nitpickers
who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, basically invented a
bunch of usage rules that unaccountably persist.

The stare turned into a glare.

Such is the dilemma of the linguist, or at least the linguist who has
any desire to reach anyone outside their — excuse me, his or her —
discipline. A sizable group of people is partial to attending
discussions and reading books about language. But what this group
wants to hear is antithetical to what scholars of this subject want to
say. Thus the most successful language book of the last decade, by
far, was the journalist Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which
took, in the words of the subtitle, a "zero tolerance approach" to
misused punctuation. Less snarky but even more cumulatively successful
are the many books that instruct readers how to avoid making mistakes,
like (to name a classic and a recent best seller) Strunk and White's
The Elements of Style and Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for
Better Writing, in which Mignon Fogarty, creator of the "Grammar Girl"
podcast, successfully extended her brand to the printed word.

When linguists try to share their insights and scholarship, the
results are rarely boffo. One of my fellow panelists that night at the
library was John H. McWhorter. A professor of linguistics at the
University of California at Berkeley before becoming a fellow at the
Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, the prolific McWhorter
has fashioned a career for himself as a public intellectual. Reading
his latest book, the compact Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The
Untold History of English (Gotham), you can feel the tension between
his scholarly findings and insights, on the one hand, and his palpable
desire to reach an audience, on the other. The book is an extended
essay on several matters the author feels other writers on language
have got wrong.

First, the respective influence of Celts, the Vikings, and the
Phoenicians on the development of English grammar has been
underestimated by linguists, he says. Second — surprise! — "grammar
mavens" from the 18th century to the Lynne Trusses of today are
misguided when they rail against "mistakes" like "everybody should
have their eyes examined" and the verbing of "impact." Third,
early-20th-century linguist Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis — that the
structure of a language in large part determines the way its speakers
look at the world — is wrong.

McWhorter for the most part is a persuasive combatant. However, I am
not wildly enthusiastic about his choice of foes. An elucidation of
Point No. 1 would seem to be more suited to an academic journal or a
scholarly monograph than a trade book. McWhorter's own chapter bears
out my sense that No. 3 is a dead horse: The Whorfian hypothesis has
already been widely discredited. And the riff on the prescriptivist
obsession with "correctness" has already been done by everyone from
Steven Pinker to David Crystal. Perhaps McWhorter's own sense of this
is why the book has an overeager, protest-too-much feel, with the
author grabbing us by the lapels in sentence openers like "OK," "Oh,
yeah," "Well," "Sure," "So," "Yep," and "But check this out."

Another recent book, Jeremy Butterfield's Damp Squid: The English
Language Laid Bare (Oxford University Press), has a promising premise.
Butterfield, described as a "freelance lexicographer" (nice gig!),
proposes to use the Oxford English Corpus, a two-billion-word database
comprising sentences from the keyboards and pens of novelists,
bloggers, journalists, scientists, and every other sort of writer, to
describe the English language "as it actually is."

One can imagine an interesting book emerging from the corpus. Damp
Squid is not that book. Instead, it is a repository of sundry language
nuggets, including the obligatory grammar-maven smackdown and a
chapter on word origins. In it we learn that the Gallup Poll is named
after the statistician George Gallup, and that "hodgepodge" came from
"hotchpotch," which originally referred to mutton stew. Damp Squid is
a hodgepodge, and a thin one at that.

In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, McWhorter writes with disdain of
the archetypal "Grand Old History of the English Language," which "is
supposed to be interesting by virtue of the sheer volume of words
English has taken on." I put a check mark next to the sentence. The
appeal of books that explain the "interesting" origins of
"cummerbund," "haberdasher," and other such terms — and they are the
second-most-popular language subgenre, next to prescriptivist tracts —
has always escaped me.

At first blush, a third recent book, The Secret Life of Words: How
English Became English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Henry
Hitchings, would appear to be just such a text. Sure enough, the index
lists "cummerbund" and "haberdasher," plus "poppycock," "gallimaufry,"
"turgidous," and hundreds more. But Hitchings's book transcends its
category. Indeed, I would place it with Fowler's A Dictionary of
Modern English Usage, Mencken's The American Language, and a couple of
dozen other titles on a shelf holding the smartest, richest, and most
enjoyable books about the English language.

Hitchings isn't a linguist but a journalist and author (previously of
Defining the World, about Samuel Johnson's groundbreaking dictionary),
so, though he has read widely in the literature — his bibliography
runs to 27 pages — he has no obligation to break new scholarly ground.
Instead, he addresses the subject with intelligence, wit, and
sometimes wisdom. He observes, "Studying language enables an
archaeology of human experience: Words contain the fossils of past
dreams and traumas. If you are reading this book in its original
English, you and I are sharing not only a language, but also an
assortment of inherited values and cultural traditions, for our
language contains traces of the histories of those who have spoken and
written it before us." The Secret Life of Words is really a cultural
history of England, seen through the prism of its language.

Hitchings always has an eye to history and context. When he turns his
attention to English words borrowed from Dutch, he offers the odd and
valuable fact that the seemingly euphemistic "poppycock" is actually a
direct translation of a vulgar expression that means "doll's
excrement." But he also considers the cultural milieu of the
etymological transfusion, noting, "From the 13th century onward, large
areas of land were reclaimed by the Dutch from the sea; whereas the
English attitude to the sea was confident, the Dutch proved
essentially defensive, and an English awareness of Dutch skill in
keeping the sea at bay gave new life to the noun 'dyke.'" Further, he
remarks that, as admirers of Dutch and Flemish painters like Hals,
Rubens, Brueghel, and Rembrandt, the British were "obvious candidates
to have adopted 'masterpiece,' a calque on meesterstuk which becomes
common in the first part of the 17th century. 'Etch,' 'sketch,' and
'landscape' are also from the Dutch."

I'd estimate that fully a third of the book has to do with the
reaction to new or newly popular English words — as tetchy at the turn
of the 17th century as it is at the beginning of the 21st. Hitchings
cites the 1605 text A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, in
Antiquities by Richard Verstegan, who "vigorously promoted Anglo-Saxon
words and customs, and complained that his countrymen had lately
borrowed so many terms from Latin, French and other tongues that
English was 'of itselfe no language at all, but the scum of many
languages.'"

Well, it may be scum, but it's our scum. The Secret Life of Words
offers entertaining proof that no matter the epoch, and no matter how
loudly the grammar mavens may protest, an English speaker can expect
to see new words impact their language.

Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and
author, most recently, of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The
Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse (Broadway Books, 2006). His
new book, Memoir: A Biography, is scheduled to be published this fall
by Riverhead Books.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i33/33b01601.htm
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http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue
33, Page B16

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