The Mother Tongue

     [My regular Gentle Readers will already be aware that I have a burr under my saddle about good English. It’s become ever larger as the years pass, in part because of the sloppiness encouraged on the Web and by cell phones. We are approaching a point at which communication among Americans will become conditional on what schools the interlocutors attended, what books they’ve read, and whether their parents were wise enough to deny Junior a computer and a cell phone until the little bastard could purchase them for himself.
     But I have a long agenda for today, including the care and feeding of a wife who’s recuperating from major surgery, so rather than work up the spit for a wholly new and original rant, have a piece from the old Palace of Reason. It first appeared there on July 2, 2004. – FWP]

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     There's been an interesting exchange of views recently on the subject of linguistic correctness, sparked by Connie Du Toit and continued by Aaron Haspel, among others. However, what makes it particularly interesting is not that any of these worthies has anything new to say on the matter. Rather, it's that no one who's been a party to the exchange has been willing to take one of the two most important poles of the debate.

     Well, your Curmudgeon does have his place in things.

     The "Ebonics" madness of a few years past ought to have been a warning sign, a shot across our civilization's bow. Persons with some following were advocating the creation of a separate linguistic community for blacks, on the grounds that the ghetto slang to which they'd attached the pretentious term "Ebonics" has "its own validity." Quite likely, none of these "educators" could define "validity" without several practice frames and a hint from the studio audience, but let it pass. The sensational aspect of the matter was the audacity of "educators" who argued for the "right" not to teach language disciplines to their charges. It completely occluded any discussion of why allowing black American youth to become an isolated linguistic community might be a bad idea.

     If you, gentle reader, are in any doubt about why it's a bad idea, consider the cage of limitation that encloses Hispanic immigrants who fail to learn English. Consider the contempt felt for them, by both native English-speakers and prior generations of immigrants who mastered the language. Consider the difficulties their children will have becoming English-speakers when their home environment presses Spanish upon them, rather than the tongue used by the society they hope to join, whose commercial and cultural opportunities they hope to enjoy.

     NASA astronauts have a saying: Communication Is Life. Indeed. Among other things, it's often the only way to persuade others not to kill you. What is generally not conceded by the excessively tolerant is that it's also the road to social acceptance, respect, and often to riches.

     Do you think your Curmudgeon overstates the case? His own fortunes are founded entirely on his communications skills. Yes, much of that was communication with computer systems, but the principle is the same. In fact, the starkness of that milieu helps to reveal the most important principles beneath the contention.

     But let's not jump to the climax of the argument quite so fast. It's worth developing a few important lines of thought, and the consequences of ignoring them -- all of which are historically well confirmed.

* * *

     If you've ever been exposed to Middle English, you already know what the temporal drift in the language has done to our ability to comprehend our forebears. Scholars put whole careers into decoding the argot of that time. Without their annotations, the texts left by famous medieval authors would be indecipherable by a layman.

     That drift occurred because of the difficulty of promulgating a language standard. The first printed books were still centuries away. Dictionaries were unknown. The class structure of pre-Industrial Revolution England guaranteed that the educated noble would speak an entirely different language from the commoner. Regional and occupational jargonization played a part as well.

     Though the sciences and technologies made slow progress during those centuries, there is still much to be learned from them, which makes it a tragedy that so few of us are capable of reading their documents. If we move forward to the Tudor era, the barriers thin somewhat, largely because of the rise of national and international trade, in which many English estates took some part. But only when industrialization made England into a massive importer of raw materials and a unique source of finished goods to be sold as widely as she could did the standardization of the English language become an urgent matter. The movable-type printing press made it possible. Among the first books to be widely produced and distributed were grammars and proto-dictionaries.

     It was about then that the persistent practices of inter-estate raids and violent sectional feuds ceased to trouble England as well. The muting of language differences seems to have played a part in the emergence of peace, though its importance is obviously open to dispute. There can be no dispute that general education received an enormous boost from the progress of linguistic regularization, and that the living standards of English commoners benefited greatly by it as well.

* * *

     The history of the ancient world features many mentions of the importance of the traveling trader as a source of news. What is seldom pondered is the prerequisite for that function: the ability to make oneself understood, which is of course also required by trade. In those days, he who traveled long distances to trade needed to be a polyglot, capable of speaking at least a minimum amount of several languages and handling the customs of several peoples as well. That, along with the requirements for integrity, competence, endurance, and self-reliance naturally limited the number of persons who could follow that star. Those few became very widely known, highly esteemed, and -- in a time of grinding, universal poverty -- very, very rich.

     Also significant from that time was the practice of using linguistic barriers to further campaigns of conquest and to secure enslavement. Armies were more willing to slay and enslave when their victims could not make themselves understood, which was a large part of the reason for the long journeys of barbarian armies such as the Vikings, Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns. Captured slaves and concubines were routinely put under the guardianship of men who could not understand them -- often, men who could only make themselves understood to their masters, and not by the larger surrounding population.

* * *

     Your Curmudgeon hopes it is understood by now that language differences are destructive barriers among men. Indeed, the effect is so powerful that, were he capable of waving a magic wand and eliminating all languages but one from human intercourse, now and forever, your Curmudgeon would not hesitate for an instant, even if it meant the permanent loss of all material written in any other tongue.

     But what would that mean? What is a language, that we might recognize this one as different from the one spoken over there?

     Quite simply, a language consists of three sets of rules:

• A lexicon or vocabulary, which maps "atomic" symbols -- words -- onto extrinsic meanings through widely accepted definitions;
• A set of rules of combination, more commonly called a syntax, by which symbols from the lexicon can be combined to form more complex descriptions, queries, and ideas;
• An accretion of lexical compounds, usually called idioms, which map to meanings that are not obvious from the standard definitions of the "atomic" symbols in the compound.

     Divergence from any of these sets of rules impedes contemporary comprehensibility, unless and until the divergence becomes widely accepted. The comprehensibility of material from earlier times will be affected if the lexical elements they used cease to have meaning to a reader of our time, if the syntactical import of their constructions is lost, or if their idioms cannot be translated.

     Of course, if that earlier material has at most a marginal cultural value, "we" can "afford" to lose it. But "we" must not assume that "we" will always be on the receiving end of the wire, or that "they" will always have little of import to say. What of the future, when persons not yet born strain to make sense of our philosophical, scientific, cultural, political, and personal legacies?

* * *

     None of this argues for a language that never adds new words or idioms, and never lets idioms whose referents have ceased to matter lapse into unemployment. But it does press for the conservation of the basis of our language: its vocabulary, its syntactic rules, and the body of idioms whose meaning has been widely accepted. Only if those strictures are maintained will men be guaranteed to be comprehensible to other men.

     This stance is called prescriptivism. We who hold to it are often derided as grammarians consumed by the fear of unemployment.

     Prescriptivism comes in degrees, like so many other convictions. "Loose" prescription seeks to conserve only the thousand words that are indispensable to common speech, omitting nearly all descriptive words, all purely cultural markers, and all idioms without a commercial demand behind them. It sanctifies the dozen syntactic rules that allow the formation of simple statements and queries, usually leaving out complex conditionals, subjunctives, and advanced usages such as ablative absolutes, gerunds, and the pluperfect and future perfect tenses. Loose prescription gives rise to vertical divisions in a language: "low," "middle," and "high" dialects. Over time, these will become close to mutually incomprehensible. The speakers of these dialects will often be stratified by wealth and political privilege as well.

     "Middle" prescription adds to the conserved set of rules. To the base thousand words, it adds a range of "discretionary" adjectives and adverbs, common cultural words, and "less important" idioms. To the dozen innermost rules, it adds some conditionals missing from the "loose" protectorate, and perhaps some subjunctives and advanced usages, though far from a complete set. "Soon I shall have set this behind me" might not be conserved, but "Some day, this will be behind me" probably would be. Here, too, a vertical division will develop between formal and common speech. They will remain comprehensible to one another, but it will be common for persons to judge one another's social status according to their linguistic command, and harder for a person of low status to rise than might otherwise be the case.

     "Strict" prescription allows virtually no changes to existing vocabulary or syntactic rules. New vocabulary will be added to answer the emergence of new referents in the relevant semantic domain, but a word already defined is deemed sacrosanct. Syntactic rules about even the most complex usages are maintained as well. To be added to the expressive set, idioms must pass stringent requirements for cultural relevance and harmony with the language's other rules. Obviously, except for occupational specialty jargons, this approach to language will guarantee the maximum degree of common comprehension and the minimum trouble in decoding texts by writers distant in time.

     Even under strict prescription, there will be a colloquial dialect and a "high" or formal one. But speakers of the formal tongue will have no difficulty speaking to those conversant only with the colloquial one, which is not guaranteed under middle prescription and against the odds under loose prescription. Commerce will be served to the highest possible degree, and though there will still be language "snobs," there will be no impenetrable linguistic barriers against economic, cultural, or political advancement.

     Strict rules make linguistic attainment easier than loose ones.

* * *

     The earliest aim of American classroom education was the promulgation of a regular language. Indeed, there was a time when "grammar" schools taught little else, under a prescriptive regime so strict as to be incredible to Americans of today. The underlying assumption was that the ability to speak and write fluidly, comprehensibly, and with flair was the key to all of society's doors. The unprecedented economic and cultural mobility of Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was strong confirmation of this thesis.

     Your Curmudgeon holds that the emergence of the permanent underclass -- persons born into poverty, who spend their whole lives mired in it, and bequeath the same to their progeny -- argues to the same effect.

     One cannot teach or learn an "undisciplined discipline" -- that is, a body of knowledge that has no enforced rules. This is as true of language as it is of mathematics. Language skills are so fundamental to the acquisition of any other sort of knowledge that the impossibility of creating well educated men who are not linguistically well equipped comes near to tautology. Put another way, by not insisting that our children acquire a rigorous command of English, and then stick to it, we virtually condemn them to mediocrity or worse in every other dimension.

* * *

     With all the racism-shouting going on today, your Curmudgeon is simultaneously amused and appalled that black and Hispanic "leaders" are so willing to accept operational illiteracy among young American blacks and Hispanics. Of course, the paradox is purely cosmetic: a "constituency" made helpless by lack of language skills is far more biddable than one which can integrate with the larger, more prosperous American culture. But for those of us not warped by a venal desire for power over others, the matter remains grave.

     Abraham Lincoln reminded us that "a house divided cannot stand." He was referring to the division between the free and the slave states, but the observation applies just as well to the division between literate and illiterate Americans, especially if the ranks of the illiterates continue to swell. As Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote in The Bell Curve, if that division were to be deepened and widened, it would force our society into the have / have-not pattern of Latin America, whose well-to-do live in hilltop garrisons guarded by men with guns to keep the impoverished masses below from approaching.

     The wide dissemination of high skill with the English language is the key to averting this fate. No other change to our educational practices or our cultural milieu comes near to that in importance. If it takes the ruthless red-penciling of billions of essays, endless drills in vocabulary and syntax, and the occasional public knuckle-basting of a recalcitrant student, so be it. Any other course is cruelty under the name of "tolerance," a sin against our young so black as to admit of no pardoning.

     Your Curmudgeon will now await the fusillades.