The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  The notion of literacy is bundled up with other ideas: imagination, self-awareness, an ‘inner life’, the power of reason, choice, moral judgement, modernity. Fundamentally, though, literacy is understood to mean ‘writing’ – the ability to understand and create written materials. Although systems of writing have existed at least since the fourth millennium BC, the modern concept of literacy begins with the development of the printing press using movable type. As I have suggested, the growth of European print culture, which began in the fifteenth century, had many important effects. First of all, it changed the way people read: the activity of reading became personal and silent, and as a result became quicker. Furthermore, print culture made the book not so much an utterance as an object. Knowledge became quantifiable; works of literature were increasingly written from a fixed point of view.4 Print stabilized the idea of the past. In due course, probably towards the end of the seventeenth century, the keeping of printed records and the codification of laws – rendering knowledge and values as objects – created the idea of a public. In the present we can see the ways in which printed writing aids education, administration and discipline. Literacy, as embodied in printed written language, is crucial to the systems we use to order our lives.

  Imagine being part of an entirely oral culture. Let us say your language is called Frimpo. The utterances of Frimpo-speakers leave no trace. People do not look things up. Instead of abstract definitions, you favour reference to your own experience: if I ask you to tell me what a flower is, you’ll show me a flower rather than speculating about floweriness. Complex thoughts can be assembled only through communication with others, and mnemonics are essential to ensure that these thoughts are preserved. Your mnemonic needs probably influence the way you organize your more complicated thoughts; you may well use verse, and failing that will use rhythm as an aid to recall. You like drawing parallels. Epithets cluster around objects. Certainly, you and those around you are sensitive to the power of words. Compared to someone in a literate culture, your thoughts are very deeply influenced through sound. All Frimpo words are sounds and only sounds, and they seem to possess magical properties. Names are vitally important; they give you power over the world. Traditions are also crucial. Objectivity is unlikely; you need to stay close to what you know, and you react to the world in a communal, participatory fashion. Empathy is a key part of your social life.5 The structure of Frimpo words is complex, too. When English-speakers write their language down, they leave spaces between their words. Very long words look strange when surrounded by much smaller words. Because Frimpo is never written down, there is no such sense of the oddity of long words; fusions of words are common. You probably have little contact with people who speak other languages or dialects, so there is less pressure on your language – less pressure, for instance, to become more simple. Frimpo illustrates the principle that isolated societies have languages fraught with archaism and oddity, whereas those societies that can be described as developed or sophisticated have languages that are comparatively simple in their mechanics.

  When a people learn to write, huge changes happen. It is usual to think these changes are uniformly positive – we might encapsulate them in the convenient word ‘progress’ – but there are certain costs. Listening skills diminish. Power tends to be consolidated in the hands of an authoritarian elite. This was famously highlighted by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, after spending time with the non-writing Nambikwara people of Brazil, concluded that writing served a sociological function rather than an intellectual one: namely, to increase the authority of those who can write at the expense of those who cannot. (Lévi-Strauss argued that this held true invariably, but counter-examples – such as the democracy of Periclean Athens – are available.) It is certainly the case that literacy is exploited by those who possess it. This may seem obvious, but it explains why the gap between written and spoken usage has been insisted on so earnestly: a punctilious, formal, systematic written language supports the mechanisms of officialdom and allows the educated to further their particular interests. When people in positions of authority express anxiety about the decline of this literacy – and about the rise of a different ‘street-level’ usage, which they may well struggle to recognize as a competing literacy – they offer an insight into their sense of entitlement and enfranchisement and into their incomplete yet urgent grasp of the precariousness of their superiority.6

  Writing may commonly be linked to personal power and achievement – from scratching down our names as nursery-school children to producing business documents as adults – but it is also linked, because of our experience of writing as part of our education, with punishment, humiliation and submission – a test, a drama, a means of limiting our existence.7 Feminist scholars have argued that writing is inherently patriarchal, and that it compromises the power of women in society. Leonard Shlain, in a highly original study of the conflict between word and image, posits that ‘a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist and abstract thinking defines the masculine’. We are all, suggests Shlain, endowed with the capacity for perceiving the world in both these ways, but the invention of the first alphabet tipped the balance of power between men and women in favour of men. ‘Whenever a culture elevates the written word,’ he argues, ‘patriarchy dominates.’8 He suggests that the benefits of literacy have made it easy to overlook ways in which literate culture has caused the brain’s left hemisphere – which is wired to process content rather than form, be analytical and discriminatory, accomplish skilled movement, and specialize in the retrieval of facts – to be prized at the expense of the right – with its greater capacity for generating non-logical feelings, deciphering images such as facial expressions, perceiving form rather than content, and processing information in its entirety instead of breaking it down.

  Claims about the lateralization of brain function are not without controversy. Yet the subject, especially as condensed by Shlain, serves as a point of entry into the vexed question of the relationship between gender and language. Of the linguistic battles being waged today, those to do with gender are among the least tractable. The pioneers of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir and beyond, have focused on language because it has enabled them to devise strategies for achieving liberty, to emphasize the inequitable history of who has been permitted to write or speak, and to highlight unfair practices and submerged meanings. Efforts of this kind continue, in mundane contexts and in momentous ones.

  Traditional images of the sexes make much of their different linguistic abilities and tendencies: women are voluble and ought to be silent, men swear a lot and should be kept out of the nursery lest they contaminate children with their foul talk, women shrink from profanity, men are less tentative in their style of speech, and so on. It was once normal to suggest that women should be denied a full education in language because knowledge of such matters might put their health at risk. Around 1530 Richard Hyrde published a translation from the Latin of Juan Luis Vives’s recent The Instruction of a Christian Woman. It included the claim – from which Hyrde himself demurred – that if women were exposed to the eloquence of Latin and Greek writing it was likely they would ‘fall to vice, upset their stomachs, and … become unstable’.9 For two centuries after this, although some like Hyrde voiced scepticism, there persisted a suspicion that women were not robust enough to deal with the hard business of grammar. Samuel Hartlib, arguing in the 1650s for educational reform, worried that women did not have the strength to survive the rigours of the classroom.

  The perception that grammar is a sort of physical challenge has a long history. It can be traced back at least as far as Greek methods of tuition in the fourth century BC, which had a strong physical basis. The ‘trivium’ taught in medieval places of learning – consisting of the study of logic, rhetoric and grammar – was an exploration of the word, but like all ways of teaching the mind a
bout the mind it had its grittily mechanical dimension. In the fifth-century writings of Martianus Capella, which were central to the medieval doctrine of the trivium, Lady Grammar was depicted carrying her specialized tools in a box; the western entrance to Chartres Cathedral shows her brandishing a bouquet of birch-rods. Grammar and trauma were closely associated: knowledge was achieved through the sort of coercion that left marks.

  During the period in which Richard Hyrde was working, and until the late eighteenth century, the limits of what men expected women to accomplish were set out in conduct books. These manuals, mostly written by churchmen, prescribed correct forms of individual behaviour. One example was A Godly Forme of Householde Government, published in 1612 and attributed to John Dod and Robert Cleaver. It differentiated the duties of husbands and wives. Husbands should supply money and provisions, deal with other men, be skilful in talk and be entertaining; wives should be careful in their spending of money, talk with few, take pride in their silence and be solitary and withdrawn.10 These attitudes were old; in Sophocles’s play Ajax, written in the fifth century BC, the hero is presented as saying that silence makes a woman beautiful, and his wife Tecmessa sniffs that this is a hackneyed line.

  The idea that men should be loquacious and women quiet is linked to the common assumption among men that women talk more than they do – memorably summarized in Byron’s couplet in Don Juan, ‘I have but one simile, and that’s a blunder, / For wordless woman, which is silent thunder’. Women’s alleged garrulousness, which in the eighteenth century was held responsible for the prevalence of bad grammar (and for other, specific crimes, such as a surfeit of adverbs), is today regarded with scepticism by experts. Yet when the old myths resurface, they are enthusiastically publicized. In 2006 Louann Brizendine, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco, scored a commercial success with a book entitled The Female Brain, in which she claimed that ‘Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand’. She expanded on this by saying that ‘women, on average, talk and listen a lot more than men’ – some readers will instinctively agree – and that ‘on average girls speak two to three times more words per day than boys’ – now we are in more dubious territory – before asserting that ‘Girls speak faster on average – 250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males’.11 These figures were not the product of research, and Brizendine’s sources leave something to be desired; one source for her first statistic is Talk Language, a self-help book by Allan Pease, author of such works as Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps. Authoritative studies suggest that the disparities between the conversational speech rates of men and women are small, and that the 7,000/20,000 dichotomy is baloney.12 But Brizendine’s ‘findings’ were widely reproduced.

  It has become common to argue that there is no such thing as fixed gender identity. Instead gender is a performance. Gender seems self-evident, but it is really an accomplishment – ‘embedded so thoroughly in our institutions, our actions, our beliefs, and our desires, that it appears to us to be completely natural’.13 Every functioning gene in a man’s body is found in a woman’s also (and vice versa), with the exception of the gene that determines whether we are male or not. The maleness gene is like a switch, which activates or deactivates certain other suites of genes, but men and women depart from identity of design only with regard to the physiology of reproduction and some related problems.14 Of course, this is not a trivial departure. Our relationships, the ways in which we socialize, our attitudes and our wants are shaped by biological fact. However, physiological difference is supplemented from the moment of our birth (‘It’s a boy!’, ‘It’s a girl!’) by rituals, commentary and received wisdom that cause us to grow up in distinct ways. In the long term, this may seem to guarantee the continuity of biological reproduction – whether it actually does so is questionable – but it also perpetuates social patterns in which the female is expected to be passive, cooperative and nurturing, while men are expected to be active, competitive and aggressive. We speak of ‘the opposite sex’, and in countless smaller ways reiterate this opposition.

  Most men and women are aware, both in the workplace and in their personal lives, of communication problems that appear to arise because of differences between the sexes. The typical male observation – and I am aware of the crudeness of this generalization – is that women are too emotional, while women – the same caveat applies – are apt to find men too authoritarian. In her book Gender-flex, Judith Tingley identifies certain differences: women ‘express to understand’, ‘support conversation’ and ‘talk to connect’, whereas men ‘express to fix’, believe ‘conversation is a competition’ and ‘talk to resolve problems’.15

  The American linguistics professor Deborah Tannen has written several popular books about differences between the conversational styles of men and women. Her explanations elicit frequent nods of assent and the occasional moment of fervid irritation. The irritation often stems from the uncomfortableness of the truths she illuminates. Tannen’s writing is based on research and scrupulous observation, not on a wily sense of her own innate rightness. She notes that in young girls’ conversation the main commodity that is exchanged is intimacy. Indeed, it is something the girls barter. By contrast, boys barter status. She also shows how indirectness in women’s talk can be not defensive, but a means of creating rapport. At the same time she is careful not to say that all women are indirect, and she points out that in some communities male indirectness is highly valued while women practise a comparatively artless style.16 Tannen’s main contention, though, is that boys and girls grow up in different subcultures; these establish different conventions of interaction, one area of which is the use of language.

  Others have argued that the differences between the languages of men and women have come about because men have relentlessly dominated women. Language has been a mechanism for repressing women. This view has led some feminists to call for a new, utopian female language, a fabricated alternative to the present state. A more conservative kind of activism involves language planning: documenting sexist language practices, and amending language to make it more symmetrical in its representation of men and women.

  Sexist bias has long been evident in such disparate domains as children’s books, assessment in schools and universities, the reporting of rape cases and the treatment of psychiatric disorders. More obvious to all is the hostile vocabulary applied to women’s sexual appetites: a woman who is promiscuous or even just flirtatious will be flayed with abuse (slut, slag, whore, and so on), but there is no equivalent vocabulary of disapproval for men who behave in this fashion. Love rat is perhaps as close as we get. Try also to think of male equivalents for such terms of half-enraptured denigration as pricktease, temptress, siren, sexpot, jezebel, jailbait or femme fatale, or indeed for equivalents to pussywhipped and cuntstruck. We hear far more about nymphomania than about the male form of ‘hypersexuality’, namely satyriasis. There are abundant terms of endearment and appreciation for women and children, and far fewer for men; this says more about the nature of the appreciation than about the nature of those being appreciated. There are many words and expressions that present women as commodities; you can still read, for instance, about women being ‘married off’. Men are sometimes forced into arranged marriages, but the language used of this is not dehumanizing. We also see gratuitous modifiers: someone is described as a ‘lady doctor’ or a ‘male nurse’, implying norms (male doctors, female nurses) that are outmoded. Even apparently innocent terms such as girl and lady are more heavily sexualized than their male equivalents.

  Dictionaries, particularly those aimed at schoolchildren, long represented male and female sexuality in different ways: there was more about male genitals, and these were identified as sexual, whereas female genitals tended not to be. The penis was described as being used for copulation, whereas the vagina was identified as a sort of channel or canal, and the clitoris was presented as a ‘rudimentary’ little
version of the penis.17 This kind of thing is uncommon now. But the habit of denying or circumscribing female sexuality remains.

  Men have historically monopolized the naming of the world’s phenomena, and until the modern era they dominated formal education – both as providers and as recipients. The first woman to make a palpable contribution to the study of English was Bathsua Reginald, who around 1616 collaborated with her father, a London schoolmaster, on a system of shorthand, and nearly sixty years later, under her married name Bathsua Makin, published An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in which she complained with enjoyable vigour about the deficiencies of William Lily’s system of grammar.

  The first Grammar of English to be written by a woman was probably Ann Fisher’s A New Grammar (1745). The wife of a Newcastle printer, Fisher had nine daughters and ran a school for young ladies. A New Grammar shows her determination to move away from modelling English usage on Latin; she is critical of existing grammars, suggesting that they are of limited use to teachers. She also came up with the original strategy of confronting readers with examples of what she called ‘bad English’, which they were then expected to correct. The innovation, as we know, became popular.