Webster’s Third was, needless to say, a red flag to the fuddiest of the duddies—the crowd that believes that dictionaries are there to instruct rather than to reflect current usage, that “bad English” is accompanied by loose morals,43 and that people spoke better English (just as they listened to better music and fought better wars) back in the good old days. The two groups have been on the warpath ever since. In the March 1997 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mark Halpern (major prescriptivist), called it “a war that never ends,” and each generation brings new ammunition. As David Crystal puts it, “One generation’s linguistic pedant is the next generation’s critical butt.”44 Even Reed and Kellogg, in a sentence meant to illustrate a two-word predicate, acknowledged succinctly that
I’d have to describe myself as something like a medium-strength prescriptivist, or a situational semi-descriptivist, or maybe just a linguistic agnostic. When I’m not getting paid to do so, I do my best to keep a lid on my aversion to “I am taller than him”45 and the use of “enormity” (which means “very great wickedness”) to mean “very large hugeness.” I don’t go as far as the writer David Foster Wallace, who has written that “listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails.” But, like Strunk and White, I can’t keep myself from deploring, for example, the substitution of “nauseous” for “nauseated,” which surfaces in everything from the compositions of nine-year-olds to best-selling novels by Booker Prize-winners.46 And I spend quite a bit of time sorting out “that” from “which” and putting in and removing hyphens and (something new and frightening I’ve begun to see lately) battling the idea that “infinitesimal” means not “very very small” but “endless.”47
As someone who inhabits both roles, I must confess that I like editing my own work more than I do writing it. I find first drafts painful; what I love is to revise and polish. Sometimes I think I write simply to have the fun of editing what I’ve written. But I do try not to let my professional sticklerism impinge on my daily life—not to natter on at people about the joys of proper grammar and usage. My friends who aren’t editors are amused by my obsession with commas and solecisms and dangles and grammatical glitches—I know they see me as the poor doomed herring whose brain has been addled by all that tree-whacking. I recently silenced an entire dinner party when I began to rant about how one of my hapless editing victims doesn’t understand the meaning of “Indian summer,” which—damn it!—is not a warm spell in November but the phenomenon of unseasonably warm weather after a killing frost. If you use it wrongly, you lose the whole bloody concept of Indian summer,48 which should not be jettisoned along with all the other useful and wonderful English expressions that we’ve lost because people just don’t care enough or pay enough attention to blah blah going to hell in a handbasket yak yak yak the end of civilization as we know it yadda yadda yadda.…
When my little diatribe wound down, everyone started talking at once: What’s the problem, Kitty? Why was that so terrible? Does it really make any difference? That’s what they said aloud. I could sense the unspoken—these were, after all, my good friends—subtext:
Or something like:
Or, more simply and to the point:
49
I try, really I do. I no longer say the snooty “It is I,” but the cheerily populist “It’s me.” I’ve given up on the off-putting “To whom do you wish to speak?” and force myself to say, “Who do ya want?” But it’s not easy. I grew up in a richly grammar-infused household. My grandmother forced my scholarly and high-achieving mother, the oldest of eight, to quit high school at sixteen and contribute to the family income—in other words, to trade in her dream of being a Latin teacher for a job on the switchboard in a department store. Her meticulous grammar, her appreciation for a well-turned phrase, her curiosity about words, her apparently inborn gift for perfect spelling, her Latin prizes—even her beautiful handwriting, which persisted unchanged until her extreme old age—were suddenly irrelevant. My mother lived a very long time, but she never got over that disruption in her early life.
But once I was born, she had a pupil-in-residence she could put the teacherly screws to. (She would probably disapprove of that last sentence’s final preposition: her formal schooling ended in 1926, when grammarians and teachers were still clinging to the mostly doomed attempt to stuff the unruliness of English into the well-made boxes of Latin and Greek, which is like Cinderella’s stepsisters trying to get that glass slipper to fit over their big, ugly bunions.) Mom thought diagramming was the cat’s pajamas. I don’t know if she learned it in elementary school—she was almost exactly contemporary with Eudora Welty—but it was just the kind of meticulous, practical, and good-for-you activity that she liked, like learning to iron my father’s shirts from a pamphlet put out by the government after the war (collar first, front last). I still remember, at age nine, waking up early one morning to find that Mom—who must have checked my homework the night before—had left me a note propped against the Cheerios box. In her firm, disciplined script, it read “I before E except after C.” I had never heard this homily before, and I truly thought that my mother had lost her marbles and was now communicating in a code known only to herself and perhaps the crowd of Martians who had taken her over.
I also remember her horror when, at around the same age, I tried to get out the door with “Me and Ann are going over to Barbara’s.” I was brought back in and given a brief, cogent lesson in Pronouns, Nominative Case of. And another day, when the same Ann got mad at me and accused me of being “too nonchalant,” I marched home in a snit and repeated this indignantly to my mother, who had a good laugh—but also took the opportunity to give Ann credit for knowing the word well enough to misuse it.
I have obviously inherited a degree of language snobbery. As a human being, I rejoice in a devil-may-care approach to grammatical correctness. I cherish our dialects, which are one of the few ways left to us of preserving our regional identities.50 I love ingenious slang terms, wacko clichés (my favorite is “it gets my goat”), and vivid language. Expressions like “that dog don’t hunt” and “I could care less” might occasionally pass my own lips (only, of course, when I am under severe stress). But as my mother’s daughter and a copy editor to boot, I must officially deplore them all when I find them in print.
I do believe that clarity in speech and precision and consistency in writing will never cease to be important. Language exists so that we can communicate with each other, and surely it continues to be true that—even in a world of email and IM-ing and :) and understaffed classrooms and an anti-elitism that has trickled down from the president himself—we communicate better when we speak and write clearly, and that when we communicate better, we understand each other, and that when we understand each other, life in general is greatly improved.51 I suppose if I have any rules of writing, they would go something like this:
1. Communicate.
2. Communicate elegantly.
3. When elegance is beside the point, fuhgeddaboutit.
And it’s good to remember the importance of context. I speak slightly differently to, say, my landlord than I do to my editor friends, and a smart kid who grew up saying youse or ax will know not to say “I’m axing youse for a job” at an interview.
As a writer, of course, I try to do my part to keep English accurate and well-scrubbed. Every word I write here is a conscious choice, often deliberated over for much too long.52 (And I hasten to add that, as Orwell cautioned in “Politics and the English Language”: “Look back through this essay and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.”)
Nobody expects emails to be brilliantly written (though it’s fun to get one that is). Everyone has inarticulate moments both in speech and on paper. Every writer, including the great ones, is entitled to the occasional rush of creative momentum that lets slip a grammatical misfortune. And I suppose every copy editor, even Ian McEwan’s publisher’s copy edit
or, has moments of sleeping on the job.
But something in me can’t deny that these considerations are important, and I don’t think I’m a rare bird. Doesn’t the world seem to be as full of language snobs as it is of English-abusers? And what if we called them not language snobs or other bad names, but simply reasonable people who want to write clearly and correctly? What else explains the wild popularity of Lynne Truss’s best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves? Or the persistence of William Safire’s “On Language” column in The New York Times Sunday magazine? Or the emails that deluge bloggers from readers complaining about their use of language? For every careless “me and him went out,” or “Express Lane—10 items or less,”53 or “We except donations” on a sign at the Salvation Army, or “We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job,”54 there’s an indignant language nut brandishing an umbrella, and probably writing a book.
But even those of us who appreciate good grammar and proper punctuation and all that don’t always respond well to the snotty attitude of some prescriptivists, as exemplified in Truss’s ridiculing of what she considers bad English—including the attempts of immigrants to use it (resulting in such less-than-hilarious errors as “Plum’s 49? a pound”)—an attitude that seems to be deeply beside the point when her own subtitle (The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation) is desperately crying out for a hyphen.55
I’ve never been an immigrant, but when I see a lapse in the English used by immigrants, I try to remember my own disastrous forays into other languages. I know a lot of French that disappears when I’m flustered, just enough Italian to get into hot water when I try to speak it, and no Spanish at all (but that doesn’t keep me from trying to fake it). I have never really recovered from the Paris waiter who in a voice dripping with l’horreur (verging on la nausée) informed me (not without Gallic glee) that I had just asked not for a glass of wine but a cup. Or the waiter in a Perugia café who told me, much more sweetly, that I was referring to my husband as she. Or the cleaning woman at a Mexican hotel who patiently endured my interminable and garbled request for an extra blanket, then told me in English that she’d have one on the bed by the time we returned from dinner. So when someone from Pakistan or Romania or China who might not even share our alphabet puts an apostrophe in a funny place, I tend to feel a certain sympathy.56
* * *
We’ve pretty much gotten over the truly silly rules. But there are three common errors that everyone still freaks out over—or over which everyone still freaks out—or maybe over which out of everyone still freaks.
1. Ain’t isn’t any more acceptable today than it was for Profs. Reed and Kellogg, who considered it vulgar and said so in no uncertain terms. We’re often told—by people who refuse to comprehend that the use of ain’t marks the beginning of barbarism—that the word wasn’t taboo for such venerated 19th-century writers as Jane Austen (“Mind me, now, if they ain’t married by Midsummer!”) and Anthony Trollope, whose amiably degenerate aristocrats were always complaining, “I’d be happy to pay what I owe you, but I just ain’t got the tin.” But both those writers used “ain’t” only in the speech of characters who were—well, vulgar: social-climbing hussies and upper-class twits with drinking problems. For most educated people, ain’t has long persisted as one of the unforgivable linguistic sins.57
But ain’t is a sincere attempt to improve the English language. Thanks to some medieval oversight, we don’t have a contraction for “am not.” There was a flurry of support for “amn’t” (young children blurt it out instinctively, and Joyce uses it in Ulysses), but for some reason it didn’t catch on like “he isn’t” and “you aren’t.”58 It persisted in England longer than in America (we’ve always outdone the Brits in terms of primness), and I’m told it’s still heard in Ireland and Scotland. But gradually, ain’t, for legitimate phonological reasons (legitimate but, to me, absolutely opaque, which is why I’m not elaborating) wormed its way into the role and then, at some point in the 19th century, ain’t too fell out of favor. Now it is universally vilified. Why? Strictly speaking, “he ain’t” and “you ain’t” are, in fact, incorrect, but “I ain’t” is not, if we consider it as a form of “amn’t.” We have replaced it with the completely illogical “aren’t” in constructions like, “I’m right, aren’t I?” Anything but ain’t! Even something twice as wrong! But no one ever said English was rational.59 As the early grammarians soon found out, Latin it ain’t.
As for diagramming an “ain’t” construction—well,
But it’s inelegant, confusing, and—worst of all—pointless.
2. Then there is youse, which is part of standard speech for several of my aunts, my neighbors, and half the people on the G train out of Brooklyn on a given morning. To me, it’s a natural addition to English: it’s the plural you—our vous—and sometimes it seems quite handy.60 When my aunt Cora asks, “Do youse want a piece of pie?” she’s addressing everyone at the table, not just one favored cousin. When my landlord asks me, “So when do youse want me to come up and fix the terlet?”61 he wants to make it clear that he’s fixing the toilet for both my husband and me, not just me—which might sound a bit saucy. In the South, they solve the problem with y’all, in a few other parts of America (including West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and southwestern Ohio), it’s you-uns,62 and in the Bible it’s ye. Waiters faced with a tableful of hungry customers often resort (at least in the kind of restaurants I go to) to something like, “So are you guys ready to order?” It’s a little grating—I suspect my youse-using aunts would consider “you guys” hopelessly coarse—but it does get around the problem.
For all its usefulness, however, youse is almost as depraved as ain’t. H. W. Fowler in Modern English Usage (now and for many years one of the sacred texts of language purists) calls youse “a low-prestige substitute for the second person plural,” and mentions that it’s used in such places as Liverpool and Glasgow. He admits that it can be useful for fiction writers, as a kind of short-hand to indicate low class in a character. In Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, for example, Stephen Crane has a tough little guy named Jimmie say, “Youse kids make me tired,” which diagrams interestingly as:
It’s worth noting that by the time Fowler wrote Modern English Usage in 1926, when he was 68, he had lived most of his life far from the maelstrom that was actual human speech, in an isolated cottage on the island of Guernsey, relying on the classics for his knowledge of good usage and various newspapers for examples of bad. Despite this seeming handicap, he was a prescriptivist who was surprisingly tolerant and laid back about the language, and he hated snobbery. Fowler, though himself a product of the 19th century (b. 1858), probably would have found Kellogg and Reed and their diagrams a bit stuffy. (Hard to imagine that the man who wrote, “Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched” and “Prefer the short word to the long” would consider the all too typical Reed-Kellogism “Towers are measured by their shadows, and great men, by their calumniators” an acceptable sentence.) Still, Fowler could be rather out of touch: in his original edition (it has since been revised twice), he deplored what he called a “genteelism,” saying ale when you mean beer because you think beer sounds vulgar—unaware, apparently, that they are in fact two distinct beverages.
By comparison, H. L. Mencken, who did for “American” what Fowler did for “English,” cited colloquialisms he heard himself on the streets of Baltimore, like “I wisht I had one of them-there Fords” and “I don’t work nights no more, only except Sunday nights.” (He says, “This last I got from a car conductor.”)
Mencken made it clear that he didn’t use such substandardisms himself, and I hasten to add that I don’t either—at least not often. Even though I admit that there are times when it would make sense to do so, I do not, for example, resort to youse. With both my mother and Sister Bernadette hovering in their saintly way somewhere over my head, I find a circumlocution: Who wants a piece of pie? In writing, this kind of simple re-wording is often the answer to such gnarly
problems. (As Mencken put it, it’s only people “of limited linguistic resources” who find them difficult.) But in speech—well, as the great lexicographer (and prose stylist) Samuel Johnson himself said in his 1755 dictionary, “Sounds are too volatile and subtle for legal restraints.” But, of course, he didn’t know my mother.
Interestingly, there are languages that have a solution to the youse ambiguity, or its cousin, the we dilemma—languages that go beyond Latin or the Romance languages, or German, or Russian, with their tu and vous and voi and ty and vy and du and ihr to indicate singular and plural. None of those languages really tackles the problem. But many Native American languages, including Cherokee and Mohawk, have pronouns that include words for “you and I,” “another person and I,” “several other people and I,” and “you and I plus one other person.”
So if my aunt Cora’s background was Cherokee instead of Irish, when, in the language of her ancestors, she asked, “Do youse want some hoe cake?”63 we’d know exactly who was being offered hoe cake and who wasn’t.
And, for the record, that question diagrams just as nicely either way:
Do you(se) want some hoe cake?
3. Double negatives. Unless they’re embedded into song titles—“You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog,” “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”—or other beloved pop-culture catchphrases (“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet”), double negatives are right up there with ain’t and youse as markers of seriously low class. (Except for Gertrude Stein, who in her essay on Henry James—well, more or less on Henry James—fearlessly presents us with what may be a triple negative: “Not to say this slowly is not to say this not at all.” To clarify, she follows up with, “To say this not at all slowly is not not to say this at all.”) I remember how clever it seemed when, back in grammar school,64 we were told that double negatives were unacceptable because they contradicted themselves and ended up saying the opposite of what you mean: they canceled each other out. If you can’t get no satisfaction, then you must be able to get some satisfaction. Right? Sister Bernadette or Miss Peckham would snicker at the absurdity of the very idea. Sister B might even have to get out her trusty ruler and rap the knuckles of the class dunce (“I didn’t do nothin’…”). To which (older, wiser, braver) I would respond today: Yes, it makes perfect sense, Sister, except that no one in his right mind would ever misconstrue that sentence, and—hell-o?—sentences are not math problems. But—if one does insist on getting mathematical about it—who could deny that a double negative has twice the value of a single one?
Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog Page 6
