I want to preface this message with two points. First, I listen to the Derek McGinty show often and have each time found it interesting, important, and thought-provoking. I really can say that with honesty. Today's show was less than that.
Secondly, I apologize for the length of this message, but to cover all the information(?) on your show today will take a bit of doing. Thank you for bearing with me.
Today's installment of the Derek McGinty Show reminded me of one Dick Cavett show I saw in high school. I always liked Dick Cavett a lot, but on this one show, he had a panel of five people talk about the deterioration of the English Language. None was a linguist. All belonged to the self-righteous, self-appointed linguistic police. One was John Simon, who was more self-righteous about his admittedly good use of English, one of his second languages, than any native speaker I have ever met or heard. One was Agnes DeMille. One was John Galbraith, the economist. What any of these people had in the way of linguistic credentials escaped me then and escapes me now, as do, I am sorry to say, the names of the other two.
Later, after I received my graduate study and degree in Linguistics, I came to understand why that program had offended me so. It ignored reality, it insulted my intelligence and the intelligence of the average person who is kept from understanding the real issues in the discussion.
The show today with Ellie Grossman was a Chicken Little fest, much like that Dick Cavett show back then. She, Mr. Green , and the callers all talked about mistakes and the right and wrong of English grammar. I tried for 45 minutes to get through, but could only get busy signals. I wanted very much to bring up some points about English, about language, and about how people think about language. I will launch into it all here and hope that you can relay this message to both the host and Ms. Grossman.
First of all, as in that most lamentable of Cavett shows, there was no linguist to talk about how inane nearly everything proposed on the show was in light of how language actually works and changes over time. It is unforgivable to waste the airwaves with an hour-long program about a topic when neither the host nor the sole guest understands the essence of the topic at hand. Would you have a show about the Mars lander and not invite a planetary astronomer, or even a physicist or chemist?
Talking about which usage of which word is correct and about pet peeves of "grammar" serves to perpetuate the average person's complete ignorance of linguistics and of how language really works.
Language changes. You can't do anything about that. We can all agree on a reasonable lingua franca. Perhaps written English can be it. But whose version of written English? And the English in use during what period of history? More on this later.
People in the 1600's where lamenting the disastrous state of English. People in the 1800s were so concerned about the state of English that they developed an inferiority complex about it, the only solution to which was to impose the grammar of Latin on English. Hence, the erroneous notion that you can't end a sentence with a preposition. Prepositions are "preposed" in Latin, they come before.... The English equivalents of Latin prepositions never had that restriction in English, or in its close ancestors.
By giving airtime to people who think that language is static and that it can be prescribed any more than other organic systems of human behavior, keeps people thinking that language is all about how wrong it is to use "anxious" when you really mean "eager."
By insisting that people not invest the effort to learn about what Ms. Grossman called "jargon," the show steered the discussion onto a completely superficial level: the not very terribly useful level of people complaining about their pet peeves and when to use "lay" and when to use "lie."
Can you imagine, during that show about the Mars lander, insisting that no one use any of the following words: mineral, vacuum, atmosphere, wavelength, traction, sediment, water? Of course not.
Why is it that the average person knows the basic units of science, math, etc. and nothing about language? People have some inkling about what an atom is, a molecule, electricity, solutions of solids in liquids, and they have some inkling about how the physical world works. Gravity makes things fall, the world is not flat and does not rest on the back of a large turtle. Why aren't people taught the basic concepts of words, morphemes, phonemes, clauses, etc.? If they were, discussions like your show today (and even discussions that were conducted by both sides of the "Ebonics" argument) would fall apart. You wouldn't give airtime to two people arguing over whether the flat earth was resting on turtles or on a large table, would you? Both arguments ignore reality.
Your show today did that very thing. It gave airtime to the pettiest of discussions that ignored the basic essence of what language is, how it is used, how it changes, etc.
First, there is the issue of Prescriptive Grammar vs. Descriptive Grammar. Prescriptive Grammar is doomed to failure. If it were not, we would be speaking Ms. Grossman's idea of a perfect English. Or perhaps would we be speaking the English of the Dick Cavett's John Simon's 1970s. Wait, perhaps we would be speaking the English of late 1800s when someone somewhere decided Latin was the perfect language. Or perhaps we would still be speaking Chaucer's English. Or perhaps we would be speaking the English that existed before the tremendous influence of French and Latin between Old and Middle English. Or perhaps we would be speaking Proto-Germanic or perhaps Proto-Indo-European....
Pick a point in time and you will find some linguistic Luddite pointing to the terrible state of English at that moment and conveniently forgetting all the evidence that has gone before that proves the untenability of their position.
The reality is that language is the most basic of human behaviors. It is so basic, so part of who we are as individuals and as a culture, that people take it for granted. It is the basis of most thought. If you have a word you have a concept; if you have a concept you have a word for it. There is much about language that is chicken-and-egg-like. It is the basis of everyday life. It is the tool we use to construct our world. For this reason, one can understand in one sense why people are reluctant to see their concepts (read "language") change. However, it does change. It changes as culture changes, as more and as less is required of it. It fits the current reality. It is the current reality.
One might be concerned about how we don't dress like we used to, how cars aren't designed with the same round lines that they were in the 40s, or with the same square lines of the 30s. One might be concerned about how music just doesn't seem to follow any of the old rules anymore. These are all part of culture and they all change. People do complain about how "young people" dress, how new types of music just don't sound like music anymore. I'm sure my dad's parents thought that the swing music he listened to as a young man was just too outrageous. It just didn't follow the rules of what decent people call music.... Can you imagine having an installment of your show where all you did was tell people how wrong it is, how unacceptable it is, for example, for a woman to wear pants to work because that's not how some book of etiquette says to do it?
Descriptive grammar is the best we can do. We can talk about how language really works and try to understand how it affects and is affected by everything we do.
Perhaps we should look at some examples of "mistakes" that people brought up on the show today. Ms. Grossman said that one should never say "anxious" when they mean "eager." First of all, all languages have a way of using emphatic words and phrases that result in their losing their strength. For example: In English, "very" has lost much of its punch. So, we say things like, "Oh, that was terribly kind of you," or "I wanted so badly to say something." Would Ms. Grossman say that this use of "terribly" is wrong?
English is nothing special. This kind of thing happens in all languages. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, the word for "very" (I will write it in pin-yin: "hen" (pronounced kind of like "hun")) lost so much of its emphatic quality that it is now, in most phrases, essentially meaningless, but is always used before what we would consider adjectives because its presence is grammatically necessary. Chinese employs other what-we-would-consider-adverbs when using emphasis.
I submit that "eager" just isn't quite strong enough. "Anxious" has taken over.
"Hopefully" has come to mean exactly what Ms. Grossman (and William Safire, the most self-righteous and self-appointed of the self-righteous self-appointed linguistic police) would like it not to mean. It is no longer simply an adverb to describe a person's actions. It is a sentence/discourse level adverb, a phrase to introduce an entire idea, very much like "unfortunately." She can argue all she wants. At some point, lexicographers as well will admit that the word has changed, as every last one of the words we use today has changed over time.
I wonder if Ms. Grossman is one of those people who believes it is wrong to say, "It is me." It is not and never has been. This rule came about when the square-peg-in-round-hole stuffing of English into Latin grammar was perpetrated on the English speaking world. Think of French: "C'est moi?" So-called object pronouns also have (and always had in English) another use: that of a "disjunctive pronoun." A pronoun that is somehow split apart from any real grammatical function. (Another example: Q:"How could you do that?" A:"Who? Me?")
One caller brought up the "erroneous" use of "dialogue" as a verb. Ms Grossman agreed that it was not right. There are many instances of words that, over time, move from one part of speech to another. Gee, the word talk is a verb and a noun. Imagine that. Changes in word use are sometimes even more subtle than that.
Does Ms. Grossman know that "read" was once an obligatorily transitive verb? Grammatically, it required an object. It was grammatically wrong to say "I read." You had to say something like "I read a book." Things change though, don't they?
Does Ms. Grossman know that it was once wrong to say "one pea?" "Pease" was a 'non-count' noun, like corn. You could get a bowl of pease, but you couldn't get one pea, because pease was not a plural. Now it is. Oh, my gosh, will you just look at just how far English has deteriorated.
Does Ms. Grossman know that the snake we call an "adder" was once called a "nadder?" It is easy to see why it changed the way it did.
Everyone on the show ooh-ed and aah-ed about the use of "could have went" and "could have saw." If they knew that English used to have several other tenses that have dropped from use over centuries and that what they see is that very same process continuing, they would not be so upset. In English we used to have a very productive subjunctive verb tense form. We still have a bit of it left: "I demand that he *come*." (Normally (in the indicative), of course, this should be "he comes"). So there are remnants of the subjunctive in English. However, it is nowhere near as prevalent as it once was, as it still is in Spanish, even French, even German. What a disastrous state English is in ... Can you believe it? .... we don't use the subjunctive tense as much as they did 300 years ago. What is this world coming to?
Does Ms. Grossman really believe that she is speaking or writing some form of English that is inferior to what it once was because of these things? Of course not. Why does she insist that we all speak worse English than we did 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago?
One can argue what the meaning of words ought to be if we had our way. It is however a waste of time. We cannot look at language today and worry about right and wrong. Language, like history, moves through time, changing. It's like taking a snapshot of a person and thinking you have recorded the history of western civilization.
The real problem is that from elementary school, children are taught to hate grammar because it is prescriptive and everything we all do is wrong. Even the grammar they learn is based on Latin, a dead language that, although having a common ancestor with English, is a reasonably remote cousin, rather than a sibling.
If children, or even high school students, or even adults were exposed to how language behaves over time, across cultures and subcultures, within and across realms of use, etc., they would appreciate the wondrous thing that language is and why it is so basic (and in many ways so constraining) to our lives and our ways of thinking.
We could be teaching people the history of English, the ways in which English is an amazing interlacing of sounds, syntax, semantics, culture, sub-cultures, history, etc., etc. We could be teaching people how complex language is, that its very complexity and subtlety and ambiguity is what makes it creative and powerful and even beautiful in the hands of a great speaker or writer. We could be teaching the ways in which English is nothing special (that is to say that all languages go through these changes, have this much complexity and creative potential).
But, instead we choose to tell people what used to be grammatically acceptable is, in the present, correct and the things that come out of their mouths are "mistakes."
There are some points on which we might agree. I agree that in writing we might strive towards some commonly accepted rules. I think of this more as a convention that as a way of telling people that their mode of communication is inferior to someone else's. For example, many people in the world are multi-lingual. However, when two or more people get together to communicate, they must work out some common ground. the same is true for dialects. Many people are bi-dialectical or multi-dialectical. When they get together, it might help to have some common ground. However, the following two sentences are very different:
We will likely, in the future, arrive at the same place where modern Arabic is currently. There are many dialects of spoken Arabic, mostly based on regional differences. However, for official writing, one form of Arabic (based on what now seems a bit older form of Arabic) called "Classical Arabic" is used most often. In English, while Ms. Grossman and all the callers to the show lament the state of affairs, do they know that there are millions and millions of native speakers of English, in Australia, in England, in India, who speak an English that has characteristics that she and they would consider ungrammatical?
The thing to do is to teach people what it means to be bi-dialectical. Some of us are better at "register"-shifting (that is moving from one degree of politeness to another, for example, depending on the situation) than others. But all can be taught. You can teach someone that just as it is impolite to be casual in a situation that requires politeness, it is impolite to be polite in a situation that requires being casual (e.g., talk to your best friend or spouse as you would to the Pope or the Queen of England and you will be very impolite). You can also teach someone that for different situations, you should use different forms of English. It is not difficult.
What is problematic is drumming into someone's head the notion that their language, their mode of communication is full of "mistakes" that require "fixing," and that therefore by extension, they speak a flawed, inferior form of language.
We need to teach people what language can mean. For example, I agree with Ms. Grossman that the commercial she referred to (where the advertisers were intent on preventing the preventing of the customer's reaching their destination) is bad. However, it is bad not because of some ancient grammatical point that some English professor has basted in formaldehyde and stuck in a jar for reuse. It is bad because it the meaning of the sentence, using today's meanings of the words, is not what we can assume the advertisers intended. Those meanings may change over time, but any way you look at it, the sentence is not, for lack of a better term, self-consistent.
I remember Ms. Grossman mentioning that the producer told her to keep things hopping on the show. I wish I had gotten on the air with my phone call. We might have gotten into a lively discussion.
Well, I apologize again for the length of this treatise. I feel the need now to write a book. Perhaps I should strive to be a Carl Sagan-like popularizer of real linguistics, at war against the pseudo-science proponents of petty English prescriptive grammar. I feel very strongly about the issue of the general population's ignorance of language, languages, and linguistics. I apologize if any of my rantings above, which are driven by this strong feeling, were in any way insulting to you, Mr. Green or Ms. Grossman.
Please feel free to respond or to forward this message to Ms. Grossman so that she might respond. Thank you very much.
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Alan Pagliere
e-mail: apagliere@umi.com
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