A Field Guide to the Wild Peevologist

I just discovered this blog today (I claimed it in the name of This Is So Gay), and began going through earlier posts before I found this one on the descriptivist / prescriptivist controversy, centering on Henry Hitching's book The Language Wars.  The blogger, Jan Freeman, points to a New York Times blog post by John McWhorter, who tries to stake out a middle ground between descriptivists and prescriptivists:

We can teach people which forms of English are acceptable without thinking of the more colloquial phrases and words as errors. Rather, what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion.

Those who ignore rules of fashion exercise little influence in society, whether we like it or not. But we wouldn’t see someone wearing breeches or petticoats as mentally ungifted, and the same should go for the person who, as millions of English speakers do every day year round, uses they in the singular as in Tell each student that they can hand the paper in until 4.

Freeman agrees, stressing the etiquette metaphor over the fashion metaphor by citing the journalist and blogger John McIntyre:

A perfectly grammatical published sentence, he notes, can amount to “a breach of manners, because etiquette requires consideration of the other party, and this sentence shows no such consideration to the reader.”  That’s a criterion that will always be relevant, however fashions in usage may change.  

I wrote about Hitchings earlier this year, and made some similar points. But I disagree with McWhorter, McIntyre and Freeman on the etiquette thing.  We're all closer to each other, I admit, than any of us is to Joan Acocella, whose sloppy and ignorant review of The Language Wars Freeman criticized.  But as a critical reader of Miss Manners, I know that throwing a tantrum over someone else's etiquette gaffe is thoroughly and unacceptably rude; so are the tantrums thrown by prescriptivists. McIntyre distances himself from prescriptivist

cranks and snobs, and I am loath to be identified with, say, Clark Elder Morrow, whose uninformed railings against the OED are just sad; or David Bentley Hart, who has argued (I am not making this up, you know) that prescriptivism is morally superior to descriptivism; or Mark Halpern, who is writing admiringly in the Vocabula Review about Dwight Macdonald's attacks on Webster's Third, evidently unaware that the battle was lost half a century ago and that Macdonald's fulminations merely look hilarious today.

So please do not number me among that gaggle of self-named paragons of civilization peddling what Henry Hitchings calls in The Language Wars "bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance."

Hitching came close to this when he wrote that "proscriptivists" would be a better label than "prescriptivists."  Just look at the comments on McWhorter's post, for example. McIntyre goes on to paint himself as a kinder, gentler prescriptivist, and he even admits: "To be fair to descriptivists, they aren't saying otherwise, merely that standard written English is not the only legitimate form of the language, and not one that is suitable for all people on all occasions." Just so. I think I was closer to truth when I argued that a descriptivist will tell you that certain forms and words and constructions are appropriate when talking to certain people -- when to use tu and when to use Usted in Spanish, for example -- and if you want to get along in a given language, you must know these conventions.

What a descriptivist -- this descriptivist, anyhow -- won't do is grant that people who don't know or can't master certain styles of language use are inferior beings, and those who can are superior, decent people who are entitled, even obligated, to humiliate their inferiors and then cackle about it gleefully.  As a recovering grammar neurotic myself, I've decided to channel my neurosis into correcting only the errors of prescriptivists -- and they make many of them.  This is why I part company with McWhorter when he writes, "Those who ignore rules of fashion exercise little influence in society, whether we like it or not."  First, the parallel to fashion breaks down here: how much influence on all of American society do fashion elites -- the designers, the catwalk fashion shows -- actually exercise? They're off in a world of their own, if they think their bubble is The World.  Second, most people who are pounced on by proscriptivists don't "ignore" rules of grammar: they don't know them, and their schooling was arranged so as not to teach them.  Third, in the long run the efforts of the proscriptivists are vain, their influence less than those they attack and mock.  Like King Canute, they can't stop the tide of language change from rolling in, and they are unaware that the "proper" English they speak was yesterday's improper English.  But, finally, whatever influence proscriptivists do have in society, they don't deserve it and their claims to superiority, let alone their contempt for what they consider the lower orders, should not be tolerated.  Whether you accept the etiquette analogy or the fashion analogy, their behavior shows their inferiority.

Racial Impurity and Gender Confusion

Here's a speculation. I'm reading John McWhorter's new book What Language Is (Gotham Books, 2011), which begins with a lengthy discussion of the difference in complexity among languages. Some have intricate systems of case, gender, or counting; others don't. This much I knew already. McWhorter argues, though, with numerous examples, that the "simpler" languages are usually the result of a sudden influx of speakers trying to learn them as adults. Infants acquiring their first language can, and do, master complex grammars effortlessly. After about the age of fifteen, this ability shrivels up, and few adults can learn new language with any fluency. Therefore they tend to simplify the new language, stripping away verb conjugations, noun cases, genders, and expressive particles. Their children learn the simplified version, and if there's a critical mass of such new speakers, they may affect the language as a whole: "over generations," as McWhorter says, "the very essence of what [a language] is starts to change. Namely, it gets simpler" (24). His first example is ancient Persian, but English went through a similar process.

English, like Persian, was stunted by too many adults learning it for an extended period of time. In this case it was the Scandinavian Vikings who invaded, starting in the eighth-century A.D., and stayed on to marry local women and knit themselves into English society. As new waves of Vikings kept blowing in over generations, children grew up hearing as much "funny" English as native: that is, without gender, using here instead of hither, chucking the difference between has seen and is departed, and so on. Scribes kept writing Old English more or less as if this wasn't happening, but then ... the Norman Conquest put written English on pause.

For two centuries, the written language of England was French, and when English started being used on paper [parchment and vellum, more likely] again, it was "middle" in the same way as Persian when it came back to light -- slimmed down and more user-friendly [27-28].

How do languages become complex in the first place? McWhorter argues that this a consequence of what he calls "ingrown" languages, where a population is relatively isolated, and so has the time and freedom to elaborate its language.

Even if we are aware that what is unusual is when a language is less complicated rather than when it is extremely complicated, a temptation always looms to attribute the complexity of language to some kind of utility. The idea that it is due to something as wan as drift or incremental habit formation sits awkwardly in the mind, especially for speakers of a moderately complex a language as English. Surely, we may think, all of that machinery in a language like Pashto must be for something. It couldn't just be buildup, like some ring in a bathtub [55].

McWhorter thinks that language complexity is just buildup, and gives plenty of reasons for believing that the complications "vastly overshoot anything that would be of any use to a child getting a grip on the system."

Languages are complicated because they can be. They complicate as a natural result of millennia of habits developed by people using them quickly and unconsciously. Because babies can pick languages up despite the massive accretion of complexity this yield, languages stay complex -- unless something intervenes, such as grown-ups learning them [59].

So, on to my speculation. McWhorter's discussion reminded me of gender, which after all relates to language. English is a relatively ungendered language compared to many others, such as French or German or Spanish. But in such languages, which randomly assign genders to inanimate objects, such as la mesa (how do you tell whether a table is masculine or feminine?), there are also contradictions.

German has a suffix, -chen, that makes things dear and small ... and it has neuter case. That means it takes the article das instead of the masculine der or feminine die. ... But once that suffix exists, you just know that somewhere along along the line, -chen will be applied, quite logically, to a woman to create a word meaning something like girly or maiden. It was: Mädchen. But that meant, automatically, an irregularity -- das Mädchen is a neuter word even though it refers to something clearly female [71].

In Spanish, -o is a masculine ending, but the word for hand is feminine: la mano. And so on.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about the way young children assign gender to objects in the world around them, as described by Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender (Norton, 2010).

At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male and female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There's some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup, and so on are intended before their second birthday. And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong [211].

But even as they are forming themselves into little gender cops, they can be fooled, because so many of their gender categories are as arbitrary and fanciful as the notion that a hand is feminine or a girl is neuter:

Indeed, so powerful are these metaphorical gender cues that five-year-old children will confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls [224].

So this makes me wonder if the elaboration of such cues might be connected to the elaboration of linguistic categories, both of which seem to be congenial to children, but which can be and sometimes have to be abandoned. In the case of gender, the fanciful imposition of rigid categories, the insistence that everything has to be crammed into one or the other box, doesn't work for most adults. There's a popular tendency to blame bigotry on adult indoctrination of children, but I don't believe it's always so. I think a lot of it is invented by children trying to make sense of the world, who find it difficult and painful to break down the walls they set up at an early age, especially since our minds "harden" as we get older. Just a thought, though.