Correct English

Reality or Myth?

Geoffrey Marnell

• Publisher: Burdock Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780994150219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

Writing is a form of expression, as is painting and composing music. No-one has the right to tell artists to paint in a particular way, nor the right to tell composers to compose in a particular way. So don’t we have a right to talk and write as we please?

“Appallingly ignorant!” “Standards are falling!” Such are the judgements of many a purist when they encounter language they do not approve of. But perhaps it is the purists who are appallingly ignorant for failing to see that language cannot be correct or incorrect, right or wrong. As this book proves, to call, say, a sentence that begins with and or but wrong is about as silly as calling a lampshade dishonest. It is what philosophers call a category mistake.

The English language is not going to the dogs. It is changing, but it always has been. Yet change is not necessarily for the worse. If it was, English speakers should have lost the ability to communicate centuries ago. Instead English has become the lingua franca of the world.

Language is an evolutionary gist and, like all gifts, we should be allowed to use it was please. So we need a different, more tolerant, attitude to language, one that respects the innate creativity and lust for novelty that defines Homo sapiens —and one that eradicates the anxiety that many needlessly suffer when they have to put pen to paper or give a talk. What this attitude should be is explored in this book.

1: The inevitable revolution

The two decades following the Second World War were, for many, decades of stifling conservatism. There were codes for this and standards for that. We were forever berated with “What will the neighbours think?”; our entrée knife—if we could afford a multi-course meal—had always to be to the right of the knife that would be used for the main course; men were expected to walk on the kerb-side of the footpath when accompanying a woman; women felt as though they had to change their surname to their fiancé’s once they were married; men had to give up their seat on the train to a woman; and on it went.

But the rule-bound conservatism of the time coincided with increasing participation in secondary and tertiary education. As a result, more and more people started to ask why. Why should men always give up their seat on the train to a woman? Does this also apply to an octogenarian male capable of walking only with the help of a walking frame? Must he stand up for a twenty-something just because she is a she?

And the questioning continued. Why must it be that:

Blue and green
Should never be seen
Without a colour
In between?

Is Van Gogh’s Irises, painted in 1889, a flawed painting because blues and greens run into each other? Likewise Monet’s Water- Lily Pond and La Maison du Jardinier? Of course not. So why did one need to worry about wearing a navy blazer over a green shirt? (Or even a green blazer over a navy shirt?) Gradually, and thankfully, this sort of sartorial straight-jacketing vanished (resurfacing in the early twenty-first century on some British television shows).

The gulf between convention and art showed up in music too. The following quotation, from a 1956 book on musical harmony, is typical of the times:

“As soon as we attempt to make an inversion of [a dominant eleventh chord] we find it necessary, for aesthetic reasons, to omit both root and third. This gives us a Secondary 7th chord and should be treated as such.

“The root position, however, may be used in either of the forms shown … The 9th may be either major or minor. The 3rd is always omitted.”¹

Students being taught musical composition according to such advice were becoming increasingly aware of the music of the previous 50 or so years, music that simply did not follow these so-called rules of harmony. Could the author of that book have been unaware of the by-then well-known pentatonic music of Claude Debussy or of the harmonically anarchic and yet outstanding music of Igor Stravinsky, music that paid no heed to these so-called rules of harmony? These rules may have encapsulated the aesthetics of Mozart’s time, but they certainly did not encapsulate the aesthetics of baby-boomers.

The conservative truths of the 1950s—about manners, art and music—began to crumble. They lacked logic, appeared mostly a matter of prejudice or didn’t match well-accepted current practices. The same weaknesses were spotted in what was being taught about language. Too much of what was taught was rightly seen as prejudice, or as downright incorrect. There was bound to be a revolution in the teaching of English. And there was.

Too much of what was taught was blatant prejudice

Some of the authorities to whom twentieth-century language teachers deferred did a poor job at hiding their own prejudices, thereby helping to generate a view that so-called good writing really was just a matter of personal style and taste. Here are some recommendations from one of the grand masters of the English language, Eric Partridge, from a book first published in 1942 and still in print today. The personal preferences, the prejudices, indeed the simmering snobbery, is unmistakable:

• “productivity is a horrible word; use output.”²

• “reminiscent of for indicative of or redolent of is feeble and incorrect.”

• “gent, ‘a gentleman’, is an illiteracy except when it applies to such a man as might be expected to use the word.”

• “inevitable has come to have an unfavourable sense.”

• “out loud … is stylistically inferior to aloud.”

• “Xmas … is intolerable in the pronunciation, Exmas.”

• “exposé … is a Gallicism—and unnecessary”.

Horrible, feeble, unfavourable, inferior, intolerable? Where is the science, the logic, to back up the personal preference that so obviously lies behind such views? Surely schools are meant to teach facts, not the prejudices of some one person or those of their class. It is a fair question to ask why the prejudices of Eric Partridge are worth more than those of the common man on the Clapham omnibus. Careful readers—as teachers and curriculum developers need to be—are likely to be put off by the prejudices and downright snobbishness that pepper, and ultimately flaw, Partridge’s book.

They are also likely to be put off by its title: Usage & Abusage. It is very much loaded with pejorative intent. If I use a hammer to knock down a brick wall rather than for its customary purpose of joining wood with nails, am I abusing the hammer? Or abusing the craft of woodworking? No. So why is it that I am abusing the language if I use a word in a new way (as poets, novelists and teenagers have been doing forever)? If a surgeon devises a new instrument to make a particular type of surgery less difficult, is the surgeon abusing the practice of surgery? Obviously not. And yet when I use an old word in a new way, or invent a new word, or use a “stylistically inferior” expression, I am, supposedly, abusing the language. So here is another reason why the new breed of educational bureaucrats might have been tempted to cast out the teaching of grammar. Novelty is not necessarily abuse. Moreover, to disparage novelty is to attempt to repress creativity, a defining and thus irrepressible characteristic of Homo sapiens.

Another widely respected authority on the English language is H. W. Fowler. Fowler’s advice is mostly intelligent and he is more inclined than most of his ilk to defer to common usage and idiom. But, like Partridge, Fowler’s advice is sometimes couched in the subjective, expressing mere opinion and stylistic preference:

• “and/or [is an] ugly device …”³

• “oddment. Though the word itself is established and useful, its formation is anomalous … and should not be imitated.”

• “memorandum … The commercial abbreviation memo … is best left unspoken.”

• “napkin should be preferred to serviette.”

• “exposé is an unwanted gallicism.”

In their well-regarded book The Elements of Style, Strunk and White are also guilty of prejudice against common usage:

• “Fix … Bear in mind that this verb is from figere: ‘to make firm’, ‘to place definitely’. These are the preferred meanings of the words.”⁴

• “Hopefully … has been distorted and is now widely used to mean ‘I hope’ or ‘It is to be hoped’. Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly.”

• “Like … has widely been used by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming.”

• “Noun used as verb … Not all are bad, but all ar...

Table of contents

• Synopsis
• Introduction
• 1: The inevitable revolution
• 2: The myth of correctness
• 3: Prescriptivists fight back
• 4: Taking language seriously
• 5: The bedrock of good writing
• 6: Can the quality of writing be measured?
• 7: Learning the lingo
• Epilogue
• Bibliography