by David Wolman
Not everyone is hunky-dory with this realist take. To a remarkable degree, people view words, as well as grammar and punctuation rules, as if they were jewels handed down from God by way of sixth-grade teachers—that there is simply a right way to wield a comma, spell rhubarb, or place modifiers. Crystal and most linguists take the view that language is always changing and that the purpose of linguistics is to describe how words and rules are used, not to tell people how to use them. Other people believe that the traditions of language that they learned in school exist for a reason, and therefore should be taught and enforced. The technical label for this contrasting approach is descriptivism versus prescriptivism.
The more benign form of prescription in linguistics doesn’t really bug anyone. It lays out general rules for grammar and spelling, which help to make written language as widely and easily intelligible as possible. Where the sparks begin to fly is out on the periphery, where prescription inevitably seeps into matters of taste, political correctness, and socially acceptable usage. Or, as Crystal puts it: The absolutist, “zero-tolerance attitudes that start to sound like George W. Bush.” These hard-line prescriptivists, these “valiant exterminators of dialectical vermin,” to borrow a phrase from Benjamin Ide Wheeler, believe in a clear dividing line between proper and improper language. They believe it’s the responsibility of educators, academics, writers, and editors to direct the use of language so as to inoculate future texts from sentences that end in prepositions and prevent high-schoolers from ever saying “between you and I” when they mean “between you and me.”
To descriptivists, “between you and I” and “between you and me” are both possible. Both deliver the desired nugget of information without a hitch and the fact is people nowadays are using both expressions. Strict prescriptivists in turn decry this type of change as evidence of further mangling of the language, waving copies of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style to assert the correctness of their views about correctness. (That “little book,” writes linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, “has done more than anything else to persuade people that the whole subject of usage can be reduced to a few pithy maxims…”42) Disciplined use of language, they argue, makes for clarity of expression, benefiting writer and reader alike. Descriptivists then fire back to say they honor clarity too, but want to distinguish between phony and legitimate rules that ensure it.
A grammatical experiment that confuses a sentence doesn’t do much good, and most everyone agrees that rules to help avoid such confusion make sense. With spelling, though, the assertion is shakier. When people confuse dam and damn or ingenious and ingenuous, usage referees are right to throw a penalty flag. These are two different words that mean two different things. This kind of slipup invites confusion, as do other homophones, like compliment and complement, stationary and stationery, booze and boos, pedal and peddle, and so many others. But to insist that using supercede instead of supersede necessarily bolsters clarity feels like a stretch. What about hair-brained versus hare-brained, strait-jacket and strait-laced versus straight-jacket and straight-laced, or even—deep breath now—through versus thru?43 These variable constructions may grate on one’s sense of aesthetic, much in the same way many people get nauseous when they hear the word incentivise. But does that make them wrong? Do these misspellings to some, alternative spellings to others, truly make a sentence less intelligible?
When asked to comment about the standard language, Crystal usually talks about grammar and punctuation—they are more often the topic of debate. Yet the response he often experiences when discussing grammar can also apply to spelling. Crystal has found that nudging the public away from devotion to an imagined notion of pure language is no easy task. “People who never let themselves get pushed around in other walks of life” bow down to language rules and rule enforcers.44 I would have to agree. While researching or casually talking about this book project, I frequently met people who “detest” poor spelling and “can’t stand” to see truncated renditions of words in text messages or emails. It’s as if being a spelling neocon is somehow cool.
As linguist and author Anthony Burgess once put it: “When we think we are making an objective judgment about language, we are often merely making a statement about our prejudices.” In media and lecture appearances, Crystal is often cast as the wet blanket—the guy who wants to snuff out the cheeky fun derived from policing the language and faithfully maintaining traditions of yesteryear. Crystal is the opposite of a curmudgeon, yet he ends up sounding like one anyway, telling people that whining about bad English doesn’t make sense. The irony of course, is that it’s the pundits who are adhering to pretensions, while descriptivists like the sixty-six-year-old Crystal point out that what we think of as Correct English is scientifically nonsensical, has roots in classist and even racist thinking, and runs counter to the experimental, playful, and conversational language of not-too-shabby writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare.
This tension is hardly limited to ivory tower settings. Get people talking about language or spelling standards, and they’ll inevitably bring up the 1990s brouhaha over Ebonics, whatever their recollection of it may be. Combining the words ebony and phonics, the term is used to describe the variety of English known as African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). At the end of 1996, the outgoing school board in Oakland, California passed what was in fact an unremarkable resolution stating that AAVE is a separate language from English (it isn’t). Somehow, the resolution was misinterpreted as a call for Ebonics to be taught alongside the Standard English curriculum.
A brief culture war ensued, racist overtones and all. Some observers were convinced that urban language posed a threat to the language of—that’s right—Shakespeare. Linguists quietly told anyone willing to listen that Ebonics isn’t slang or corrupted English, that it is no less grammatically sophisticated than the English of history’s literary giants, and that language variation is normal, inevitable, and healthy. But their message was drowned out by the uproar.45 Ebonics was an affront to the clean and pure mother tongue.
“At the heart of linguistics,” Crystal once wrote, “is the distinction between ‘grammatical’ and ‘ungrammatical,’ between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable.’ It is the boundary line which attracts all the arguments.”46 In the most recent decades of this battle, spelling has avoided the kind of attention that punctuation and grammar receive. People don’t think much about it, in large part because most of us prefer to see words spelled in a consistent and familiar form. Misspelled words confuse and look “bad,” which is, or has usually been, close enough to saying that they’re “incorrect.”
They are, kinda. Yet the boundary between conventionally accepted linguistic norms and this cultural thing we call “correct spelling” is blurrier and more fluid than we realize, certainly more so than a schoolteacher’s harsh red pen suggests. An average collegiate-edition dictionary of one hundred thousand words can have variable spellings for up to 25 percent of its entries, when you include capitalizations and hyphenated words—think dark-room v. darkroom, absinthe v. absinth, flower pot v. flower-pot, and Bubonic Plague v. bubonic plague.47
Hyphens are so widely mismanaged, misappropriated, and misunderstood that in 2007 the powers that be behind the OED decided to eliminate some sixteen thousand of them, mostly ones that once linked compound nouns. As reported by the New York Times, “Some [words], like ‘ice cream,’ “fig leaf,’ ‘hobby horse,’ and ‘water bed,’ have been fractured into two words, while many others, like ‘bumblebee,’ ‘crybaby,’ and ‘pigeonhole,’ have been squeezed into one.”48
A forty-five-year veteran of the publishing industry recently wrote a book about “bad English,” in which he clarifies many oft-confused snippets of spelling and usage. My favorite: “Supersede. This is the correct spelling. There is no such word as supercede,” he writes.49 What would happen, though, if someone dared to say that supercede is a word? It sure looks like a word. Recede, antecede, and precede are real words, and readers will easily
understand the intended meaning of supercede despite the “error.” Today, my current version of Microsoft Word gives the c-spelled version a red squiggly. But plug supercede into a Google search, and (as of today), you’ll get some 722,000 hits, compared to 2.4 million for supersede. And with the former entry, you won’t be asked: “Did you mean: Supersede.” So now what?*
Merriam-Webster’s 2008 Collegiate New World Dictionary includes a handful of new words with alternative spellings, such as pescatarian/pescetarian (someone who doesn’t eat meat but does eat fish), za/’za (for pizza), and ta-da/ta-dah (as in, voilà!). The inclusion of more than one acceptable spelling, a Merriam-Webster lexicographer told me, is necessary because the words are new enough that they haven’t yet settled. There’s no algorithm for determining whether a spelling has or hasn’t settled, only the expert judgment of lexicographers. Yet someday, those words will, or probably will, settle. This happens because the media and publishers make spelling choices, and because teachers start telling their students that pescatarian is wrong but pescetarian is right, or the other way around.
Magnify those judgment calls over the population of all teachers, writers, and lexicographers over a year or decade, and then multiply that by all the words they weigh in on, and the taste-driven reality of orthography evolution becomes that much clearer. As for the students writing pescatarian for a teacher who expects pescetarian, there’s now a tantalizing second option to consider before accepting the conclusion that you’ve made a mistake: Explain your feelings about pescetarianism on blogs and in Facebook conversations that happen to reach ten million seafood-eating English speakers and enlist them in an orthographic coup. If Shakespeare were around today, he’d probably say of the two different spellings: The teacher’s a knave. Use ’em both!
UNFORTUNATELY FOR JOHN Dryden, his attempt to establish a home for an oligarchy of perscriptivists flopped almost upon conception. It may have been that people finally started to envision a price tag for this undertaking, or question how a language academy would actually work. But the even more likely reason why the cause was so quickly dropped was the bubonic plague, which broke out (again) in the spring of 1665. Anyone who could flee London did. If that wasn’t enough suffering and destruction wrought by Nature, the following year brought the Great Fire, further hindering the efforts of privileged men to convene a high court of the language.50
A generation later, Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, published an article titled “On Academies.” It was high time, Defoe proposed to King William III, for a governing body to “advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language, to establish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to purge it of all the Irregular Addition that Ignorance and Affectation have introduc’d; and all those Innovations in Speech, if I may call them such, which some Dogmatic Writers have the Confidence to foster upon their Native Language, as if their Authority were sufficient to make their own Fancy legitimate.”51 In other words, Your Highness, wannabe language authorities are acting as if they possess the very power that should belong to people like me.
By 1650, printing conventions were spreading, which meant spelling variability was diminishing. Spelling guides for children began to hit bookstore shelves, sold alongside guides to manners and speech, thus furthering the association of proper spelling with proper living. The gap between how people spoke and how their words were represented orthographically was as screwy as ever. But the new books, grammar guides, and starter dictionaries provided at least some measure against which one could judge whether a spelling was correct—and by extension judge the speller.
For centuries, literacy was an essential dividing line between classes because only people of premium pedigree were educated. As books, knowledge, and education became more widespread, however, the new tool for distinguishing “us” from “them” was proper language—speech, writing, and spelling. Acceptance of variable spelling was waning, and correct spelling emerged not merely as something to aspire to for the sake of clear communication based on linguistic norms, but also as a prerequisite for acceptance within the upper echelons of English society.
Not that access was easily attainable. Newly published etiquette guides and spelling books weren’t enough to clean up what upper-class gentlemen perceived to be dirty English. Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift felt the country was engulfed in a monsoon of uncouth English. Exasperated, he revived the academy idea once again. A cousin of Dryden’s, Swift didn’t permit his Irish roots to interfere with his myopic view of language correctness and his conviction that “corruptions in our language have not at least equaled the refinements of it.”52 In his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue,” he blames almost every literate person in the country for the decrepit state of the language, including spelling reformers, playwrights, poets and, “the young academics, who…borrow the newest Sett of Phrases, and if they take Pen into their Hands, all the odd words they have picked up in a Coffee-House or a Gaming Ordinary [gambling-house], are produced as Flowers of Style.”53
Swift’s disdain for language change was all-consuming and, in a twisted way, impressive. Clipped words, as in taxi from taxicab, bus from omnibus, and rep for reputation were repulsive.* Apostrophe-enabled contractions like disturb’d and rebuk’d were despicable. Chic new words like banter, shuffling, bully, and sham were shameful. Spelling as we speak—sartinly for certainly, for instance—would destroy etymology, he believed, and if such a practice were permitted, over time “whoever hath been used to plain English, will hardly know them by sight.” Swift wanted to pull back on the reins. “I see no absolute Necessity why any Language should be perpetually changing,” he wrote. Through the effective influence of an academy, Swift, like others before him, believed he could whip the language and its speakers into shape.54
The language academy was never much more than a long shot. As Crystal once put it, the English attitude toward language seems to be more laissez-faire than that of continental Europeans. One contemporary of Swift’s who wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid suggested that while Swift was shooting for the moon with his academy, he might as well set up institutions to engineer the Grand Elixir and develop a perpetual motion machine.55
By the eighteenth century, if the aspiring academicians had any lingering hope for an English language Security Council, that hope was silenced for good by Samuel Johnson. One of that century’s titanic scholars, Johnson saw the French academy’s inability to control the French language as unassailable evidence that a British academy would never fly: “We live in an age in which it is a kind of publick sport to refuse all respect that cannot be enforced,” wrote Johnson. “The edicts of an English academy would probably be read by many, only they might be sure to disobey them.”56 The academy was dead. Yet in an ironic turn, it was Johnson who would give the correctness demagogues a device for establishing language authority without the need for authoritarian oversight: an illustrious dictionary.
Johnson was born in 1709. A revered writer-critic-essayist-lexicographer, he did most of his work in a London apartment just off of Fleet Street, the epicenter of the English printing industry. But his hometown was a place called Lichfield. On the second day of our journey, the Crystals and I made our way there. “On we go,” said David, as we walked to the yellow three-story house in the center of town, “to the other end of Standard English.”
Johnson’s father was a bookseller, and it’s a safe bet that a childhood surrounded by words was advantageous for the man who would go on to write the most comprehensive dictionary the world had ever seen. Three flights of rickety stairs inside the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum lead visitors to a room displaying an early edition of his most famous work, artifacts such as a wooden portable writing desk, and books from his family collection—zippy titles like The Preternatural State of Animal Humors Described by the Sensible Qualities and An Impartial View of the Truth of Christianity; with the History of the Life and Miracles of Apollonius Tyanæus
, containing…Taking a quill in my hand at the museum, I needed three dips in the ink jar just to write out a single word of unexceptional length: spelling. “Think of the slog,” said Crystal, referring to Johnson’s nine years of writing and editing A Dictionary of the English Language. It would have been a monumental feat even with more efficient writing technology.*
“If you’re going to be a dictionary writer, you have to be of a certain temperament,” said Crystal. Johnson suffered from scrofula, a skin disease usually caused by an infection in the lymph nodes. It left him deaf in one ear. As a young man, he didn’t have clear career designs. He studied at Oxford for a stint, but had to retreat home to Lichfield because of financial problems. “Poverty followed him like a shadow,” wrote his biographer and friend James Boswell. Johnson started out as a teacher, with limited success and apparently less satisfaction, before trying his hand as a writer. Even after he had established a solid reputation, though, money was always an issue. When Johnson was offered an advance of £1,575 in 1746 to produce a dictionary, he said yes despite failing to secure further funding from a patron, as was common practice in those days.
