On language, does form follow function?

The Providence Journal
07:40 AM EST on Friday, February 23, 2007

Alex Rose

NEW YORK -- DRIVE SAFE,” reads a flashing traffic sign on Tillary Street in Brooklyn. Is that wrong? It depends on whom you ask.

A linguist such as my cousin would say no; “drive safe” effectively performs its linguistic function in that no one misunderstands its intended message. An English professor, such as my father, however, would say yes; in standard written English there are grammatical rules stipulating that the imperative verb “drive” be qualified by the adverb “safely,” not the adjective “safe.”

This conflict lies at the heart of the so-called “Usage Wars,” the epic battle between the “Descriptivists” and the “Prescriptivists.”

To a Descriptivist, there are no such things as “correct” or “incorrect” where language is concerned.

There is only the multi-faceted spectrum of human communication and the myriad ways in which people convey meaning to one another. Descriptivists correctly note that language, like etiquette or fashion, is largely a function of class; a society’s official rules of grammar and lexicon reflect the attitudes of whoever happens to be in power.

The Prescriptivists, however, believe that language is as much an art form as a utility. It’s one thing to name objects and command that traffic laws be obeyed, another thing to express oneself with clarity, precision and cultivation. It’s the difference between playing a scale and playing a sonata; between eating for nourishment and eating for pleasure. One way gets the job done, the other gets it done well.

Therefore, a certain allegiance to tradition is necessary — words must have specific definitions, syntax must be universally consistent, etc., etc.
Not surprisingly, these two camps largely fall along political-party lines. The liberal-leaning Descriptivists tend to see speech as a naturally occurring activity such as walking or sleeping, that exists irrespective of whatever any institutional authority deems standard. The conservatively bent Prescriptivists argue the opposite case, that language is the product of a rich heritage that has earned the right to be nurtured and preserved.

Both approaches are necessary, but fall apart when carried to their logical ends. To wit, if the Presciptivists had their way, standard English would revert to its idealized Victorian state, forever uncorrupted; if Descriptivists had theirs, dictionaries would be updated hourly, validating the use of any term used anywhere by anyone.

Is it naïve to envision a happy medium between preservation and innovation?

It’s certainly tricky. Descriptivists proceed from Noam Chomsky’s observation that children do not “learn” the rules of grammar in the sense of conscious, scholastic acquisition — the way they learn the facts of history, say, or the multiplication table — but are instead born with an innate syntactical capacity to place subjects, objects, imperatives, interrogatives and other semantic elements within a given organizational framework.

To this end, the Prescriptivist rhetoric is seen as inconsequential, because any non-pathological speaker of a native language necessarily speaks it grammatically. Indeed, what the Prescriptivists fail to understand is that there are many varieties of English. Linguistically, society is a matrix of inter-connected “Discourse Communities,” each species of which defines itself according to its own (often implicit) set of lexical and grammatical rules. Black English is a dialect of American English in the same way that Cockney is a dialect of British English, or for that matter, Flemish is a dialect of Dutch, and evinces a self-consistent vocabulary and syntax.

Take the slang term “Y’all.” To anyone who has heard this word in use, it’s clear that it functions as a contraction of “you all” — the second-person plural. It’s a useful term because it distinguishes itself from the second-person singular, and that it’s used so frequently proves that there is a need for such a thing.
But merely speaking consistently does not mean speaking articulately — and this is where the debate usually comes to a head.

To Descriptivists, style itself is irrelevant; any discussion of aesthetic criteria — rhythm, specificity, economy — is dismissed as the fluffy twittering of coffee-shop patrons. They reason that such are subjective attributes reflecting merely personal opinion and shifting cultural standards.

To me, this argument seems a facile statement of the obvious. Of course style is subjective — so what? In fact, nearly everything that human beings tend to care about — the company of friends, the beauty of art and music, the flavor of food — is experienced and enjoyed through the agency of personal preference and distinction. Just because language is a fluid institution developed by imperfect men and women does not mean that it’s not logical, or that its rules are arbitrary. Language evolves (we think) because we want it to, because it makes sense to have a lot of words whose definitions correlate to things, and whose various inflections of placement and modes of diction indicate very subtle and relevant shades of meaning to the listener or reader. To quote the historian Louis Menand, “Music is wired into the brain at about the level of ‘Hot Cross Buns.’ It’s a long way from there to [Wagner’s] Parsifal.”

Similarly, language is wired into the brain at about the level of “See Dick run,” but that’s a far cry from Hamlet. Grammar may be an innate property of the human mind, but that alone does not explain the great power and grace of which expressive language is capable.

Furthermore, the Descriptivists are less like the scientists they claim to be than pollsters. They take samples of the population and average the results. If a significant portion of the population believes “irregardless” to be a word, then, by definition, it’s a word. If enough people pronounce “nuclear” as though there were a “u” after the “c,” then “nucular” must ipso facto be the standard. (After all, my cousin points out, who’s to say the insertion of an epenthetic vowel between the consonant cluster, “cal,” indicates laziness and not economy?) Scientific theories, however, are not validated on the basis of a majority vote.
Writer David Foster Wallace illustrates the absurdity of equating descriptive lexicography with science by drawing the parallel to another uniquely human phenomenon — morality. “Imagine,” he writes, “an ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do.”

The only thing the Descriptivists have going for them is that they are right. Language is indeed far more complex than it appears. What the Prescriptivists narrowly think of as American English is not a single, unified code whose iron-clad rules are either dutifully followed or defiantly ignored, but a vast weft of dialects and sub-dialects, traditions and innovations, trends and counter-trends, all of which vary according to their context. And, to be sure, we need linguistic anthropologists out in the field doing what they are doing, which is to study how actual people actually speak, not how they are supposed to speak.
But we also need people to preserve, teach, define and, yes, prescribe standard English usage. I can think of two salient reasons for this.

The first is political and utilitarian, and hinges on the conviction that language is a tool of empowerment. For better or for worse, in the United States, standard written English is the language that people in positions of power — typically the rich, the white and the educated — use to communicate with one another. For this reason, it is advantageous for those who want to be taken seriously in the world of ideas to master the manner in which those ideas are discussed. It’s one thing to vote, another thing to mobilize, draft bills, raise funds, or effectively present arguments to the people who make Big Decisions. Had Martin Luther King Jr. spoken like Dan Quayle, the civil-rights movement might never have left Alabama.

The second reason is cultural and aesthetic. In any language, in any dialect of any language, one can speak well or poorly. One can speak clearly or vaguely, gracefully or clunkily, concisely or verbosely. So why especially, should we bother championing standard written English? Why not standardize New Orleans Yat, or Pennsylvania Dutchified English, or Boston Southie?

It’s because these dialects are not steeped in and enlivened by a canon of literature — at least not yet — and as such remain disconnected from a culture of letters. Denying the value of books seems deluded to me, the equivalent of pooh-poohing education itself. Honing the skills taught by great writers not only enables one to manipulate sentences in the manner of one’s choosing, whether it be establishing credibility, arguing a point, expressing sorrow, or making someone laugh, but to vacillate between different modes and manners of expression without appearing out of one’s depth. Toni Morrison draws bountifully from black dialects in her novels, just as Faulkner did from Southern Baptist vernacular and Joyce from Dublin blue collar, but does so with the virtuosity of someone fluent in standard English.

In a nutshell: the Usage Wars might find their way toward a resolution were the Descriptivists willing to recognize that there is a difference between conveying information and conveying information skillfully, and were the Prescriptivists able to accept that there are many ways of doing so “correctly.”
I’ve heard Ivy League lectures that made me cringe; I’ve heard broken Spanglish that made me swoon. But it should not have to remain a bourgeois pipe-dream that the general populace be equipped with the tools to express itself beyond the level of “Drive Safe.”

Alex Rose is a writer and editor based in New York.