John Simon
The following college address is adapted from the printed version in Paradigms Lost, New York: Penguin, 1980.
What’s good English to you that, though it may be subjected to as many grievances as were Hecuba and Niobe combined, you should grieve for it? What good is correct speech and writing, you may ask, in an age in which hardly anyone seems to know, and no one seems to care? Why shouldn’t you just fling bloopers, bloopers riotously with the throng, and not stick out from the rest like a sore thumb by using the language correctly? Isn’t grammar really a thing of the past, and isn’t the new idea to communicate in any way as long as you can make yourself understood?
Let us, for a moment, go back into the past, or, to be as nearly exact as I can, to the early 1630s, when Etienne Pascal was teaching his barely teenaged son, Blaise, about languages. As Blaise’s elder sister, Gilberte, was to report in a memoir later on, the father was making “him [Blaise] perceive in general what languages were about; he showed him how they were reduced to grammars subject to certain rules; that these rules had yet some exceptions that had been carefully noted; and that means had thus been found to make languages communicable from country to country. This general idea disentangled his mind” — or, as some of you today might put it, blew his mind; in the original, “lui débrouillait l’esprit.” All this Etienne taught Blaise before he was twelve, at which time he started him out on his first foreign language, which was Latin.
Let us now take an even longer step back, to 1511, in which year Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly was published. In this facetious, satirical work, Folly herself is speaking (I quote only brief excerpts, in H.H. Hudson’s translation): “Among those who maintain … an appearance of wisdom,” she declares, “the grammarians hold first place.” Their schools are “knowledge factories … mills … even … shambles.” “Yet thanks to men,” Folly continues, “they see themselves as the first among men,” beating the living daylights out of their wretched students, whom “they cram … with utter nonsense.” The grammarians are particularly delighted when they “can drag out of some worm-eaten manuscript … some word not generally known,” or some other trivial information; they also form mutual admiration societies, “scratching each other’s itch. Yet if one commits a lapse in a single word, and another … lights on it … what a stir presently, what scufflings, what insults.” Then Folly cites a certain polymath who laid aside all other pursuits to hurl himself into the study of grammar so as to settle at last issues that “none of the Greeks or Latins succeeded in doing definitively. It becomes a matter to be put to the test of battle when someone makes a conjunction of a word which belongs in the bailiwick of adverbs. Thanks to him, there are as many grammars as there are grammarians — nay, more,” and Folly names the great printer Aldus, who published at least five different books on grammar.
Here we have the two extremes: in Erasmus, grammar ridiculed as the ultimate waste of both students’ and teachers’ time; in Gilberte Pascal’s memoir of her brother, the principles of grammar shown as the abolishers of boundaries between countries and the clearers of a young mind. I think both statements are as true today as they were then, but both, of course, are to some extent oversimplifications. The virtues of grammar — or, in our case, of good English — are not quite so monolithically manifest as all that; nor is the pigheaded, despotic nitpicking of the perfectionists, elitists, or fuddy-duddies (call them what you will) entirely misguided and ludicrous.
The usual, basic defense of good English (and here, again, let us not worry about nomenclature — for all I care, you may call it “Standard English,” “correct American,” or anything else) is that it helps communication, that it is perhaps even a sine qua non of mutual understanding. Although this is a crude truth of sorts, it strikes me as, in some ways, both more and less than the truth. Suppose you say, “Everyone in their right mind would cross on the green light” or “Hopefully, it won’t rain tomorrow,” chances are very good that the person you say this to will understand you, even though you are committing obvious solecisms or creating needless ambiguities. Similarly, if you write in a letter, “The baby has finally ceased it’s howling” (spelling its as it’s), the recipient will be able to figure out what was meant. But “figuring out” is precisely what a listener or reader should not have to do. There is, of course, the fundamental matter of courtesy to the other person, but it goes beyond that: why waste time on unscrambling simple meaning when there are more complex questions that should receive our undivided attention? If the many cooks had to worry first about which out of a large number of pots had no leak in it, the broth, whether spoiled or not, would take forever to be ready.
It is, I repeat, only initially a matter of clarity. It is also a matter of concision. Space today is as limited as time. If you have only a thousand words in which to convey an important message it helps to know that “overcomplicated” is correct and “overly complicated” is incorrect. Never mind the grammatical explanations; the two extra characters and one space between words are reason enough. But what about the more advanced forms of word-mongering that hold sway nowadays? Take redundancy, like the “hopes and aspirations” of Jimmy Carter, quoted by Edwin Newman as having “a deeply profound religious experience”’; or elaborate jargon, as when Charles G. Walcutt, a graduate professor of English at CUNY, writes (again as quoted by Newman): “The colleges, trying to remediate increasing numbers of … illiterates up to college levels, are being highschoolized”; or just obfuscatory verbiage of the pretentious sort, such as this fragment from a letter I received: “It is my impression that effective interpersonal verbal communication depends on prior effective intra-personal verbal communication.” What this means is that if you think clearly, you can speak and write clearly — except if you are a “certified speech and language pathologist,” like the writer of the letter I quote. (By the way, she adds the letters Ph.D. after her name, though she is not even from Germany, where Herr and Frau Doktor are in common, not to say vulgar, use.)
But except for her ghastly verbiage, our certified language pathologist (whatever that means) is perfectly right: there is a close connection between the ability to think and the ability to use English correctly. After all, we think in words, we conceptualize in words, we work out our problems inwardly with words, and using them correctly is comparable to a craftsman’s treating his tools with care, keeping his materials in good shape. Would you trust a weaver who hangs her wet laundry on her loom, or lets her cats bed down in her yarn? The person who does not respect words and their proper relationships cannot have much respect for ideas — very possibly cannot have ideas at all. My quarrel is not so much with minor errors that we all fall into from time to time even if we know better as it is with basic sloppiness or ignorance or defiance of good English.
Training yourself to speak and write correctly — and I say “training yourself” because nowadays, unfortunately, you cannot depend on other people or on institutions to give you the proper training, for reasons I shall discuss later — training yourself, then, in language, means developing at the very least two extremely useful faculties: your sense of discipline and your memory. Discipline because language is with us always, as nothing else is: it follows us much as, in the old morality play, Good Deeds followed Everyman, all the way to the grave; and, if the language is written, even beyond. Let me explain: if you can keep an orderly apartment, if you can see to it that your correspondence and bill-paying are attended to regularly, if your diet and wardrobe are maintained with the necessary care — good enough; you are a disciplined person.
But the preliminary discipline underlying all others is nevertheless your speech: the words that come out of you almost as frequently — if you are tidy — as regularly as your breath. I would go so far as to say that, immediately after your bodily functions, language is first, unless you happen to be an ascetic, an anchorite, or a stylite; but unless you are a stylite, you had better be a stylist.
Most of us — almost all — must take in and give out language as we do breath, and we had better consider the seriousness of language pollution as second only to air pollution. For the linguistically disciplined, to misuse or mispronounce a word is an unnecessary and unhealthy contribution of the surrounding smog. To have taught ourselves not to do this, or — being human and thus also imperfect — to do it as little as possible, means deriving from every speaking moment the satisfaction we get from a cap that snaps on to a container perfectly, an elevator that stops flush with the landing, a roulette ball that comes to rest exactly on the number on which we have placed our bet. It gives us the pleasure of hearing or seeing our words — because they are abiding by the rules — snapping, sliding, falling precisely into place, expressing with perfect lucidity and symmetry just what we wanted them to express. This is comparable to the satisfaction of the athlete or ballet dancer or pianist finding his body or legs or fingers doing his bidding with unimpeachable accuracy.
And if someone now says that “in George Eliot’s lesser novels, she is not completely in command” is perfectly comprehensible even if it is ungrammatical, “she” having no antecedent that is a substantive (Eliot’s is a modifier), I say, “Comprehensible, perhaps, but lopsided,” for the civilized and orderly mind does not feel comfortable with that “she” — does not hear that desired and satisfying click of correctness — unless the sentence is restructured as “George Eliot, in her lesser novels, is not…” or in some similar way. In fact, the fully literate ear can be thrown by this error in syntax; it may look for the antecedent of that “she” elsewhere than in the preceding possessive case. Be that as it may, playing without rules and winning — in this instance, managing to communicate without using good English — is no more satisfactory than winning in a sport or game by accident or by disregarding the rules: which is really cheating.
The second faculty good speech develops is, as I have mentioned before, our memory. Grammar and syntax are partly logical — and to that extent they are also good exercisers and developers of our logical faculty — buy they are also partly arbitrary, conventional, irrational. For example, the correct “compared to” and “contrasted with” could, from the logical point of view, just as well be “contrasted to” and “compared with” (“compared with,” of course, is correct, but in a different sense from the one that concerns us here, namely, the antithesis of “contrasted with”). And, apropos different, logic would have to strain desperately to explain the exclusive correctness of “different from,” given the exclusive correctness of “other than,” which would seem to justify “different than,” jarring though that is to the cultivated ear.
But there it is: some things are so because tradition, usage, the best speakers and writers, the grammar books and dictionaries have made them so. There may even exist some hidden historical explanation: something, perhaps, in the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, or other origins of a word or construction that you and I may very easily never know. We can, however, memorize; and memorization can be a wonderfully useful thing — surely the Greeks were right to consider Mnemosyne (memory) the mother of the Muses, for without her there would be no art and no science. And what better place to practice one’s mnemonic skills than in the study of one’s language?
There is something particularly useful about speaking correctly and precisely because language is always there as a foundation — or, if you prefer a more fluid image, an undercurrent — beneath what is going on. Now, it seems to me that the great difficulty of life lies in the fact that we must almost always do two things at a time. If, for example, we are walking and conversing, we must keep our mouths as well as feet from stumbling. If we are driving while listening to music, we must not allow the siren song of the cassette to prevent us from watching the road and the speedometer (otherwise the less endearing siren of the police car or the ambulance will follow apace). Well, it is just this sort of bifurcation of attention that care for precise, clear expression fosters in us. By learning early in life to pay attention both to what we are saying and to how we are saying it, we develop the much-needed life skill of doing two things simultaneously.
Put another way, we foster our awareness of, and ability to deal with, form and content. If there is any verity that modern criticism has fought for, it is the recognition of the indissolubility of content and form. Criticism won the battle, won it so resoundingly that this oneness has become a contemporary commonplace. And shall the fact that form is content be a platitude in all the arts but go unrecognized in the art of self-expression, whether in conversation or correspondence, or whatever form of spoken or written utterance a human being resorts to? Accordingly, you are going to be judged, whether you like it or not, by the correctness of your English as much as by the correctness of your thinking; there are some people to whose ear bad English is as offensive as gibberish, or as your picking your nose in public would be to their eyes and stomachs. The fact that people of linguistic sensibilities may be a dying breed does not mean that they are wholly extinct, and it is best not to take any unnecessary chances.
To be sure, if you are a member of a currently favored minority, many of your linguistic failings may be forgiven you — whether rightly or wrongly is not my concern here. But if you cannot change your sex or color to the one that is getting preferential treatment — Bakke case or no Bakke case — you might as well learn good English and profit by it in your career, your social relations, perhaps even in your basic self-confidence. That, if you will, is the ultimate practical application of good English; but now let me tell you about the ultimate impractical one, which strikes me as being possibly even more important.
Somewhere in the prose writings of Charles Péguy, who was a very fine poet and prose writer — and, what is perhaps even more remarkable, as good a human being as he was an artist — somewhere in those writings is a passage about the decline of pride in workmanship among French artisans, which, as you can deduce, set in even before World War I, wherein Péguy was killed. In the passage I refer to, Péguy bemoans the fact that cabinetmakers no longer finish the backs of furniture — the sides that go against the wall — in the same way as they do the exposed sides. What is not seen was just as important to the old artisans as what is seen — it was a moral issue with them. And so, I think, it ought to be with language. Even if no one else notices the niceties, the precision, the impeccable sense of grammar and syntax you deploy in your utterances, you yourself should be aware of them and take pride in them as in pieces of work well done.
Now, I realize that there are two possible reactions among you to what I have said up to this point. Some of you will say to yourselves: what utter nonsense! Language is a flexible, changing, living organism that belongs to the people who speak it. It has always been changed according to the ways in which people chose to speak it, and the dictionaries and books on grammar had to, and will have to, adjust themselves to the people and not the other way around. For isn’t it the glory of language that it keeps throwing up new inventions as surf tosses out differently polished pebbles and bits of bottle glass onto the shore, and that in this inexhaustible variety, in this refusal to kowtow to dry-as-dust scholars, lies its vitality, its beauty?
Others among you, perhaps fewer in number, will say to yourselves: quite so, there is such a thing as Standard English, or purity of speech, or correctness of expression — something worth safeguarding and fostering; but how the devil is one to accomplish that under the prevailing conditions: in a democratic society full of minorities that have their own dialects or linguistic preferences, and in a world in which television, advertising, and other mass media manage daily to corrupt the language a little further? Let me try to answer the first group first, and then come back to the questions of the second.
Of course language is, and must be, a living organism to the extent that new inventions, discoveries, ideas enter the scene and clamor rightfully for designations. Political, social, and psychological changes may also affect our mode of expression, and new words or phrases may have to be found to reflect what we might call historical changes. It is also quite natural for slang term to be invented, become popular, and, in some cases, remain permanently in the language. It is perhaps equally inevitable (though here we are on more speculative ground) for certain words to become obsolescent and obsolete, and drop out of the language. But does that mean that grammar and syntax have to keep changing, that pronunciations and meanings of words must shift, that more complex or elegant forms are obliged to yield to simpler or cruder ones that often are not fully synonymous with them and not capable of expressing certain fine distinctions? Should, for instance, “terrestrial” disappear entirely in favor of “earthly,” or are there shades of meaning involved that need to remain available to us? Must we sacrifice “notwithstanding” because we have “in spite of” or “despite”? Need we forfeit “jettison” just because we have “throw overboard”? And what about “disinterested,” which is becoming a synonym for “uninterested,” even though that means something else, and though we have no other word for “disinterested”?
“Language has always changed,” say these people, and they might with equal justice say that there has always been war or sickness or insanity. But the truth is that some sicknesses that formerly killed millions have been eliminated, that some so-called insanity can today be treated, and that just because there have always been wars does not mean that someday a cure cannot be found even for that scourge. And if it cannot, it is only be striving to put an absolute end to war, by pretending that it can be licked, that we can at least partly control it. Without such assumptions and efforts, the evil would be so widespread that, given our current weaponry, we would no longer be here to worry about the future of language.
But we are here, and having evolved linguistically this far, and having the means — books of grammar, dictionaries, education for all — to arrest unnecessary change, why not endeavor with might and main to arrest it? Certain cataclysms cannot be prevented: earthquakes and droughts, for example, can scarcely, if at all, be controlled; but we can prevent floods, for which purpose we have invented dams. And dams are precisely what we can construct to prevent floods of ignorance from eroding our language, and, beyond that, to provide irritation for areas that would otherwise remain linguistically arid.
For consider that what some people are pleased to call linguistic evolution was almost always a matter of ignorance prevailing over knowledge. There is no valid reason, for example, for the word nice to have changed its meaning so many times — except ignorance of its exact definition. Had the change never occurred, or had it been stopped at any intermediate stage, we would have had just as good a word as we have now and saved some people a heap of confusion along the way. But if nice means what it does today — and it has two principal meanings, one of them, as in “nice distinction,” alas, obsolescent — let us, for heaven’s sake, keep it where it is, now that we have the means with which to hold it there.
If, for instance, we lose the accusative case whom — and we are in great danger of losing it — our language will be the poorer for it. Obviously, “The man, whom I had never known, was a thief” means something other than “The man who I had never known was a thief.” Now, you can object that it would be just as easy in the first instance to use some other construction; but what happens if this one is used incorrectly? Ambiguity and confusion. And why should we lose this useful distinction? Just because a million or ten million or a billion people less educated than we are cannot master the difference? Surely it behooves us to try to educate the ignorant up to our level rather than to stultify ourselves down to theirs. Yes, you say, but suppose they refuse to or are unable to learn? In that case, I say, there is a doubly good reason for not going along with them. Ah, you reply, but they are the majority, and we must accept their way or, if the revolution is merely linguistic, lose our “credibility” (as the current parlance, rather confusingly, has it) or, if the revolution is political, lose our heads. Well, I consider a sufficient number of people to be educable enough to be capable of using who and whom correctly, and to derive satisfaction from this capability — a sufficient number, I mean, to enable us to preserve whom, and not to have to ask “for who the bell tolls.”
The main problem with education, actually, is not those who need it and cannot get it, but those who should impart it and, for various reasons, do not. In short, the enemies of education are the educators themselves: miseducated, underpaid, overburdened, and intimidated teachers (frightened because, though the pen is supposed to be mightier than the sword, the switchblade is surely more powerful than the ferule), and professors who — because they are structural linguists, democratic respecters of alleged minority rights, or otherwise misguided folk — believe in the sacrosanct privilege of any culturally underprivileged minority or majority to dictate its ignorance to the rest of the world. For, I submit, an English improvised by slaves and other strangers to the culture — to whom my heart goes out in every human way — under dreadfully deprived conditions can nowise equal an English that the best literary and linguistic talents have, over the centuries, perceptively and painstakingly brought to a high level of excellence.
So my answer to the scoffers in this or any audience is, in simplest terms, the following: contrary to popular misconception, language does not belong to the people, or at least not in the sense in which belong is usually construed. For things can rightfully belong only to those who invent or earn them. But we do not know who invented language: is it the people who first made up the words for father and mother, for I and thou, for hand and foot; or is it the people who evolved the subtler shadings of language, its poetic variety and suggestiveness, but also its unambiguousness, its accurate and telling details? Those are two very different groups of people and two very different languages, and I, as you must have guessed by now, consider the latter group at least as important as the former. As for earning language, it has surely been earned by those who have striven to learn it properly, and here even economic and social circumstances are but an imperfect excuse for bad usage; history is full of examples of people rising from humble origins to learn, against all kids of odds, to speak and write correctly — even brilliantly.
Belong, then, should be construed in the sense that parks, national forests, monuments, and public utilities are said to belong to the people: available for properly respectful use but not for defacement and destruction. And all that we propose to teach is how to use and enjoy the gardens of language to their utmost aesthetic and salubrious potential. Still, I must now address myself to the group that, while agreeing with my aims, despairs of finding practical methods for their implementation.
True enough, after a certain age speakers not aware of Standard English or not exceptionally gifted will find it hard or impossible to change their ways. Nevertheless, if there were available funds for advanced methods in teaching; if teachers themselves were better trained and paid, and had smaller classes and more assistants; if, furthermore, college entrance requirements were heightened and the motivation of students accordingly strengthened; if there were no structural linguists and National Councils of Teachers of English filling instructors’ heads with notions about “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language” (they have every right to it as a second language, but none as a first); if teachers in all disciplines, including the sciences and social sciences, graded on English usage as well as on specific proficiencies; if aptitude tests for various jobs stressed good English more than they do; and, above all, if parents were better educated and more aware of the need to set a good example to their children, and to encourage them to learn correct usage, the situation could improve enormously.
…
Yet how do we defend ourselves against the charge that we are old fogeys who cannot emotionally adjust to the new directions an ever-living and changing language must inevitably take? Here I would want to redefine or, at any rate, clarify, what “living and changing” means, and also explain where we old fogeys stand. Misinformed attacks on Old Fogeydom, I have noticed, invariably represent us as people who shudder at a split infinitive and would sooner kill or be killed than tolerate a sentence that ends with a preposition. Actually, despite all my travels through Old Fogeydom, I have yet to meet one inhabitant who would not stick a preposition onto the tail of a sentence; as for splitting infinitives, most of us O.F.’s are perfectly willing to do that, too, but tactfully and sparingly, where it feels right. There is no earthly reason, for example, for saying “to dangerously live,” when “to live dangerously” sounds so much better; but it does seem right to say (and write) “What a delight to sweetly breathe in your sleeping lover’s breath”; that sounds smoother, indeed sweeter, than “to breathe in sweetly” or “sweetly to breathe in.” But infinitives begging to be split are relatively rare; a sensitive ear, a good eye for shades of meaning will alert you whenever the need to split arises; without that ear and eye, you had better stick to the rules.
About the sense in which language is, and must be, alive, let me speak while donning another of my several hats — actually it is not a hat but a cap, for there exists in Greenwich Village an inscription on a factory that reads “CRITIC CAPS.” So with my drama critic’s cap on, let me present you with an analogy. The world theater today is full of directors who wreak havoc on classic plays to demonstrate their own ingenuity, their superiority, as it were, to the author. These directors — aborted playwrights, for the most part — will stage productions of Hamlet as a woman … or a one-eyed hunchback.
Well, it seems to me that the same spirit prevails in our approach to linguistics, with every newfangled, ill-informed, know-nothing construction, definition, pronunciation enshrined by the joint efforts of structural linguists, permissive dictionaries, and allegedly democratic but actually demagogic educators. What really makes a production of, say, Hamlet different, and therefore alive, is that the director, while trying to get as faithfully as possible at Shakespeare’s meanings, nevertheless ends up stressing things in the play that strike him most forcefully; and the same individuality in production design and performances (the Hamlet of Gielgud versus the Hamlet of Olivier, for instance — what a world of difference!) further differentiates one production from another, and bestows on each its particular vitality. So, too, language remains alive because each speaker (or writer) can and must, within the framework of accepted grammar, syntax, and pronunciation, produce a style that is his very own, that is as personal as his posture, way of walking, mode of dress, and so on. It is such stylistic differences that make a person’s — or a nation’s — language flavorous, pungent, alive, and all this without having to play fast and loose with the existing rules.
But to have this, we need, among other things, good teachers and, beyond them, enlightened educators. I shudder when I read in the Birmingham (Alabama) Post-Herald of October 6, 1978, an account of a talk given to eight hundred English teachers by Dr. Alan C. Purves, vice-president of the National Council of Teachers of English. Dr. Purves is quoted as saying things like “We are in a situation with respect to reading where…,” and culminating in the following truly horrific sentence: “I am going to suggest that when we go back to the basics, I think what we should be dealing with is our charge to help students to be more proficient in producing meaningful language — language that says what it means.” Notice all the deadwood, the tautology, the anacoluthon in the first part of that sentence; but notice especially the absurdity of the latter part, in which the dubious word “meaningful” — a poor relation of “significant” — is thought to require explaining to an audience of English teachers.
Given such leadership from the N.C.T.E., the time must be at hand when we shall hear — not just “Don’t ask for who the bell rings” (ask not and tolls being, of course, archaic, elitist language), but also “It rings for you and I.”
Redeeming Pandora 