Bad English

Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation

Ammon Shea (Perigee, 2014)

   The t-shirt that says "I'm silently correcting your grammar" has my name on it. I come by it honestly: I have linguistically sensitive forebears on all sides. My father winced at sentence adverb 'hopefully'; my maternal grandmother loathed the word 'tasty'; and I have recently felt utterly compelled to fix the number disagreement in the last sentence of the Lord's Prayer.

   But I really don't want to be a jerk about it, so I'm delighted to add Ammon Shea's Bad English to my 'language wars' shelf. Shea has taken a serious historical look at a the usage rants and grammar guides of the past century and a half. English, it turns out, changes so quickly that no guide can hope to be the last word. The peeves of the nineteenth century very often look strange to us now; the expressions that were then considered beyond the pale have either sunk out of sight or become commonplace and unobjectionable.

   Such a change doesn't even need centuries. Remember 'Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should'? "Here we have an extraordinarily clear line of linguistic demarcation. People either feel that using like as a conjunction marks one as essentially subliterate or they have absolutely no idea what you are talking about and fail to see why this would be a problem of any sort." There were many more of the first group around when I was little, and there are many more of the latter now. 

 

   We will always have doomsayers, and yet, says Shea, "English is not dying. It is behaving exactly as it should, which is to say that it is changing. All living languages change–it is one of the things that indicate that they are still in use by a large number of people. The problem is that, while many people accept that our language is subject to change, they want to dictate what sort of changes will take place and that is a very difficult thing to do."

   The rules and roadblocks set up by fourth-grade English teachers frequently have perverse effects, as either the teacher or the student remembers the rule but not the principle. Years of drilling students not to say 'Jimmy and me are going to the pool' has led to generations of people who say 'Between you and I.' Shea makes an amusing example of George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," which promulgates six reasonable-sounding rules, and breaks five of them with abandon. There must be some sort of rule about that...

   Shea is not out to stop you speaking English the way you want to. If you prefer never to split an infinitive or strand a preposition, more power to you; but don't imagine that you are defending rules handed down on stone tablets. And feel free to set a picket fence around unique and perfect, but you may also want to "accept that certain words... are used by some people in a less semantically exact manner than you would yourself employ and hope that they have some other redeeming qualities that make up for this lapse."

   Shea is being contrarian here, and a little argumentative; but I think I prefer that attitude to the certainty and superiority of the self-appointed guardians of the language. English is doing just fine; it can look out for itself.

Email edition 11/1/16