I’ve been loath to argue with peers who bewail the weakness
of grammar and spelling “nowadays.” I used to fuss about it, too. It’s so
understandable, the urge to have one’s own way of doing things universally
approved. “There’s a right way [my way], and a wrong way [their way].” But—language
changes. I imagine there was the same distress centuries ago when intimate “thou”
and “thee” disappeared by becoming one with “you” – or when verbs stopped
being conjugated more regularly, as when “thou sayest” started becoming “you
say.”
There wouldn’t have been as much fuss about written English
being "misspelled", because there was no “proper” way to spell until dictionaries
became popular, culminating, of course, in the Eighteenth Century with Samuel
Johnson’s renowned A Dictionary of the
English Language. Shakespeare certainly used flexible spelling, even for his surname. As far as we know, no
one complained about it; those who could read knew who or what he meant, and
that was what mattered.
As a person interested in writing, certainly I delight in
elegant style, or wild-but-knowing rejection of the “norm,” but I also love
writing that speaks truth from the soul of a life that wasn’t taught standard
English from childhood. A resume likely needs to be correct according to
current standards, as that’s an easy way for a company to reject an
application, but I also suspect companies miss out on excellent employees by
following that route.
Our society is in flux; why shouldn’t we expect the language
that mediates and reflects our social world to reflect that? As Jan Zwicky said
in the Fountain Lecture at the University of King's College this past February,
“Language is the ghost of the grasping hand.”
Perhaps what we’re really distressed by is the
disintegration of our social construct. Just as it’s pleasanter to judge “the
other” rather than see our own darkness, being upset by people saying “I” when
we believe they ought to be saying “me” is sheer joy compared to looking at the
mess we’ve made of our world, the mess we’re passing on to the next generation
to remediate – the same generation whose grammar and spelling we deplore.
Great post! I've been aware of my own tendency to be prescriptive about language since my linguistics studies days. But since frequent texting seems to have eroded my mental capacity for using the correct homonym, I'm having to loosen up about it.
ReplyDeleteComprehensibility is my gold standard now.
One of my favourite stories about language comprehension is about the time when I was asked by a newcomer to Canada how to enter the Toronto subway at an automated entrance. I explained that all that was required was to put a token in the slot in the turnstile and walk through. I was confused by his blank look until I realized that he didn't know what "token" meant in relation to the TTC. We back-tracked to the token vending machine and I explained what a token was and how to operate the machine to acquire some. And that did the trick.
This taught me that our speech is often based on assumptions about "the other" – a basic assumption that they know the same things and understand them in the same way that "we" do. And I learned that we communicate better if stay open to learning about what the other knows, rather than assigning it.