You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity | by Robert Lane Greene | Random House | 336 pages, $25.00
There’s a certain outspoken portion of the English-speaking population that’s really, really into grammar. Much like those who are sticklers for, say, etiquette or Robert’s Rules of Order, grammar people think of themselves as principled people of substance, convinced that declines in grammar standards indicate corresponding declines in morality. Grammar and punctuation just aren’t taught in schools anymore. This is why people can’t write. This is why the world is going to hell.
Then again, some would say the world is going to hell because of the language sticklers. In his new book, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, Robert Lane Greene, a correspondent for The Economist, writes that proclaiming the superiority of one way of writing and speaking over another isn’t just an annoying habit—it’s a serious political matter. Language is a tool used to foster identity and nationalism. Insisting on one “correct” way of using a particular language is often rather like insisting on the superiority of one’s own culture. Furthermore, argues Greene, “errors” are only the evolution of language, anyway. As people speak, they develop new rules and new standards. No rules are fixed, and attempts to resist linguistic evolution are not only wrong, they’re ineffective.
As he writes:
The long arm of the modern government has been tempted to fiddle with the language rule book itself: governments have banned words and phrases, coined new ones from thin air, fiddled with the writing system, and otherwise used the power of the state to influence the natural growth of languages. The rougher governments of the world threaten harsh penalties when their linguistic laws are not observed: using banned “impure” words or a writing system that has fallen out of favor, for example. This kind of linguistic activism by politicians has rarely been successful. Yet still they try.
Language evolves, Greene explains, and his discussion of that evolution is probably the strongest part of the book. The language we speak today is radically different from that spoken by our linguistic ancestors, who enjoyed no widely accepted standards for language usage. This is why Beowulf is unreadable to modern English-speakers and Shakespeare is only barely decipherable.
The truth is that industrialization led to language standardization. The West created public schools, standardized textbooks, and commonly understood language rules at more or less the same time the first factories opened. If everyone needed to learn how to perform the same interchangeable tasks, then everyone needed to speak and understand the same interchangeable language.
After characterizing language standardization as a tool of capitalistic crowd control, Greene argues that today’s sticklers who stand athwart the vernacular yelling “Stop!” aren’t just pedantic—they’re anti-democratic. Greene denounces those grammar gurus who preach cultish reverence to things like capitalization and the serial comma, reserving a special abhorrence for Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a book with, he explains, “nary a sentence failing to scream bloody murder or whip of a linguistic lynch mob.” He also has problems with William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style, finding their arbitrary, unexplained rules (possessive apostrophes after s-words, etc.) confusing and their lofty commands (“Use the active voice”) oppressive.
Or maybe he just finds the people who are really into Strunk and White troublesome. Greene’s general rule seems to be that there are a lot of people who get really wound up about correct English usage, and that these people are pathetic, controlling jerks. He’s probably right, but do these people really pose much of a threat to democracy? Even the sort of people we think of as sticklers—say, your ninth-grade English teacher—probably didn’t think the English language was ordained by God with perfect rules for all time. No, Mrs. Stevens just wanted you to learn how to clearly communicate your ideas so that people could understand what you were saying.
Daniel Luzer's analysis is interesting. It is hard to see how Robert Lane Greene could have found a publisher for such triviality. But it is the norm. Witness Ben Zimmer's failed "On Language."
The best grammar in the world is the COBUILD English Grammar. It is an index to the foolishness of teaching in America that some students, even at Harvard, think that SAT writing has some merit (I will provide a writing sample). CJR should make the new third edition of the COBUILD grammar official for its operations.
The idea behind good grammar is to sensitize students to the possibilities of the language, not to put handcuffs on them. Good grammar provides the basis for rhetoric: paragraph development, for example (an excellent way to learn about "contrast" is to index the COBUILD grammar, for "not because, but because" as an instance).
Can we find an ur-paragraph in American prose style, with implications for Melville and James, that will bring out the interface between grammar and rhetoric? And give us the background for the beauty of American prose style in Hemingway, Faulkner, and McCarthy?
Here is that paragraph from "The Scarlet Letter" (I have separated out the sentences so as to highlight the grammar):
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal.
Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. [Purpose]
If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. [Condition]
She grew to have a dread of children; for they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but one only child. [Reason]
Therefore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously. [Result]
It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves,—had the summer breeze murmured about it,—had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud! [Manner, Result, Counterfactual, Counterfactual, Counterfactual]
Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye.
When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter,—and none ever failed to do so,—they branded it afresh into Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. [Time, Result]
But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict.
Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable.
From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture. [Manner]
If we were to learn adverbial subordination in the COBUILD English Grammar, become perceptive about the forms in "The Scarlet Letter," "The Turn of the Screw," and "Heart of Darkness," and practice these forms in our speech and writing, we would no longer be interested in such nonsense as the thoughts of Robert Lane Greene on grammar.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 1 Apr 2011 at 01:14 PM
It should be possible objectively to kill the symbolically and emotionally sensitive topic of 'the" passive, but the subject will keep coming back forever. Perhaps an index to the inattention built into language.
If we were to suppress the passive, we would be the poorer for it, for what should be obvious cognitive reasons. Anyone who has doubts should study minutely Mark Ashcraft's excellent "Cognition."
If we make a formal set of 60 verb elements of the past--including tenses, present and past perfects, "past" modals, and modal past perfects--we will see that 22 of the elements are passive (for example, 'was being stolen,' 'having been overpowered,' 'had to be hidden,' 'must have been fabricated'). Eight of these passives are perfects.
Therefore, impoverishment in the past and perfect systems of American and other English would result from lopping off the passive. But the key fact is that the brain thrives on manipulating the elements, all of them, not just to avoid errors, but far more importantly, to gain plasticity in the mind.
It is as if I were to read one of the many great books on professional tennis and fail to grasp the power of the backhand. Or submit to sinister theories about lefthanders. Language is based, often, on contrast. Between /f/ and /v/, unvoiced and voiced consonants in poetry, in Milton and Keats. To say that /f/ is unvoiced and therefore "weak" and so to be avoided would be to lose the contrasts in consonant gradation.
If we look at a broken window, we might get angry that anyone would dare to describe it as "broken," because that implies that it has been broken by someone. The passive creeping in again. You just can't fight it off.
It is a mystery that so many like the easy subject of writing on the English language without understanding it. In textbooks of epistemology, this fact is shuffled into the background. As if language were obvious. If it were, we would not have this continual reversion to half-baked ideas about "the passive."
#2 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 1 Apr 2011 at 03:42 PM
The Economist's intelligence unit--so called--has not been able to figure out the opportunity costs of the virtual corporation teaching and testing English globally. How large is this business? It probably runs in the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues every year, most of the money being poured down the drain on IELTS, SAT English, Kaplan courses, Azar grammars, a legion of trash never before seen in any form of information.
It would all be benign if English had nothing to do with reality. If International Relations "realist" memes were not rooted in language incomprehension. If our thinking were not interleaved with our sentence forms. If grammar really did not matter, it would have nothing to do with words, and nothing to do with discourse.
Let's take a good text sample: in this week's New Yorker, "A Murder Foretold," by David Grann. What is "grammar" in this article? The lead: [Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn't because he was approaching old age--he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated.]
Repeatedly, in this article, as might be expected in a murder story, the passive slots in naturally and persuasively. The grammar of Grann's writing is a permanent refutation of libels of the passive (as if we did not know). The lead paragraph is alive with contrast ('It wasn't because..."; "Nor had he been diagnosed..."; "Rather, Rosenberg...was certain that...".)
The most productive way of studying contrast in English text is through the "COBUILD English Grammar" (by indexing the whole book); it is far more powerful than the chapter on paragraph development on comparison, contrast, and analogy in "The New Oxford Guide to Writing," for example. Grann is skilled with reported clauses, whether with verbs ("knew") or adjectives ("certain"). The COBUILD grammar contains the best introduction to reporting in English.
A good project would be to analyze the interface between grammar and style in The New Yorker article (perhaps the most fascinating such project would be with Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle").
#3 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 1 Apr 2011 at 07:34 PM
Does anyone else feel that the New Yorker prose has declined precipitously in the last decade? They're locked into a format for their longer pieces that requires a detailed anecdote in the first page (with specific dates and heightened, detailed descriptions) which then opens up to the larger theme a few pages later.
Not to mention the lack of any memorable fiction. When was the last time people talked about a New Yorker story? (I'd say "People Like Us are the Only People Here" which was over a decade ago.)
#4 Posted by JLD, CJR on Sat 2 Apr 2011 at 08:01 PM
I second Clayton's comments about "the possibilities of language". There are absolutely grammar sticklers with a superiority complex (my dad likes to tell a story about being at a small diner where the menu had something "in the au jus sauce", and my grandfather felt the need to flag down the waitress to notify her of the redundancy). But I think for many a stickler, it's not about looking down on others for being incorrect. Some people haven't had the education, or just aren't language people, just as I struggled in chemistry and biology and physics, and I can't fault them for that.
Rather, it's about the fact that lovers of language know and appreciate not only the possibilities of using language, but of its ties to other knowledge. If you know the root differences of two similar words, it can help shed light on the difference between them. Knowing the phonetics of a language can be a handy aid when learning another, not to mention the fact that having a clear understanding of a language's grammar—or heck, even a vague grasp—makes it more likely that you'll be able to read, pronounce, and understand unfamiliar words when you encounter them. Knowing your grammar can help to understand how communication with that language has evolved.
When it comes to the complaints of grammar sticklers about things like Tea Party signs or Sarah Palin's flubs or what they hear when eavesdropping on a conversation between teenagers, I think it's less about incorrect grammar per se and more about the fact that many of the culprits don't seem to care that they don't know, and fail to see the purpose of grammar beyond simply knowing how to read. It's frustrating. Even more frustrating is when people try to use fancy sentences or big words—meaning they have some sense of the value of language aptitude—and use them incorrectly. This may be sort of a psychological thing in that if you believe yourself to be a language person, that kind of flub humiliates you to your core, so we despise it in others. But anyway.
Personally, I'm all for the evolution of grammar and I love new words, and there are some rules that I hate and try to avoid (like how in AE we're supposed to put the comma that's not part of the quote inside the quotation marks; I also enjoy long sentences, which is one reason I love Spanish so much—they're much more acceptable in respectable writing; I also enjoy beginning sentences with "And" and "But"). But, at least from what I can tell, as I haven't read the book, Greene is simplifying grammar sticklerism a little too much.
#5 Posted by Malvond, CJR on Sun 3 Apr 2011 at 01:04 PM