few months ago, while her grandmother and brother and I were at the McDonald’s Play Land, my granddaughter ran to the big picture window and demanded, approximately, “Ahn eee eeece!”

Like most people, I have had several opportunities in my life to watch carefully as a toddler learns to speak, and the experience is always fascinating, awe-inspiring, and a little eerie. The speed with which the kids acquire, one after another, the million little tricks that are language can give the fleeting sensation that they are not children at all, but highly intelligent aliens in disguise, here from Andromeda doing reconnaissance. At the same time their progress is thrilling and touching and frequently hilarious, but afterwards it is no easy thing to explain why you had those reactions. If you don’t write them down, the cute things your kids say melt away like dreams, and you promptly forget them. If you do write them down, you come back in a week and the cuteness has wilted right out of them, because whatever took your breath away the first time—the new word, the trick of inflection, the invented expression—has by now become a regular part of Junior’s repertoire, and no one can see any longer what the first fuss was about. For the same reason, it’s mostly a bad idea to try to tell your co-workers about the cute thing Angie said yesterday. They pretend to get it, but really don’t.

In Norah’s case, she had arrived not long before—a month? two?—at the stage where you could tell her “Say x,” and she would give it her best shot, usually getting most of the vowels and almost none of the consonants. “Say, ‘shut the door’” would bring back, instantly, “Uh—ah—oh,” with a beaming grin. A request for “Bummer, Grandma” produced “Mumma, Mama.” Meanwhile she had begun that determined, enthusiastic babble that makes adults turn to each other and remark, “Well, she knows what she means”—and say what you will, I believe she mostly did. Right beneath the surface of that aural porridge, exciting things were happening: conjugation, syntax, vocabulary. She would jabber away with real urgency, repeating the same sounds in a determined tone, pointing, wriggling, till even B.F. Skinner would have admitted that she came equipped with built-in grammar, and ahnt ik was “I want a drink.”

But in this case her meaning was crystal clear. Next to that McDonald’s is an empty field with a big pond, and a small flock of geese had been camping there. On the way in, both kids wanted to stop, and we had gently urged them, “We can see the geese later.” Half an hour later, Norah recalled that sentence, added and deleted some things, and gave it back to us: “I want to see the geese.” The grammar and vocabulary were already in place, and only the phonology still lagged a bit.

Now, I count fourteen phonemes or basic sounds in my fully-rendered version of the sentence. How is it that Norah could make herself clear with just four? And what does that tell us about language? For starters, it tells us that language is surprisingly overbuilt, “redundant” not in the bad sense that bothers editors and teachers, but in the good sense that pleases engineers and safety experts. Just as the roof of your house is stronger than it has to be to keep raindrops or roofers from falling through, so an average sentence has more joists and nails than it really requires just to make the meaning clear. Even in what everyone agrees is an era of slovenly pronunciation—a judgment to be taken with a grain of salt, since people have always agreed they are in such an age—you can take almost any spoken or written utterance, remove a few of the functional elements, and find that the meaning is still clear. Aunt Ida, gracious and polite, asks, “Pass the salt down this way, would you please, sweetie?” Uncle Harry contents himself with “Please pass the salt.” Brother Bob mutters, “passasawt,” while Father, weary after a long day, says just “Salt?” Norah, at this stage, would outdo them all, producing a single syllable consisting of just the vowel (more or less) followed by a tiny proto-consonant that could be either a t or a k. Unless she pointed, only her parents and her four year-old brother would understand, but they would get pretty much the same meaning from her little bit of verbal ectoplasm that everyone else got from Aunt Ida’s fully evolved sentence.

Everyday speech continually demonstrates how little articulation is really necessary on strict functional grounds, offering countless examples of clipping, slurring, elision, and other economies. In the President’s idiolect, the two-syllable, four-phoneme gonna has entirely replaced the three-syllable, seven-phoneme going to, nonstandard got regularly pinch-hits for the breathier have as an auxiliary, and and then has decayed to something that sounds like nen. These are blights on the office, perhaps, but which of us can honestly claim to tag all the bases of can not or comfortable or I am thinking about or It is a nice day, is it not?  In the normal course of things, how are you doing contracts to howyadoon, and even hey, dude subsides to just dude!, preceded by a little chin-thrust or upwards nod. It is not just sounds that are economized, but words, grammatical structures, and even whole trains of thought. I remember from my teenage years a time when it was perfectly reasonable to say to any of my friends “No duh!” meaning, roughly, “Yes, of course, that’s obvious,” with the added implication, depending on intonation, either that you agreed completely or that you thought the antecedent remark rather stupid. We had arrived at that idiom, first, by the custom of greeting any stupid remark or action with a drawn-out, mocking “Duh-uh!” Then I suppose we noticed such expressions as no shit and no kidding, the tone of which varies easily through the register from warm affirmation to jeering sarcasm, and we constructed an analogy or hybrid, our quick disyllable that conveyed, “That’s not the kind of observation for which we will all shout duh at you.” Crucially, though, you had to understand that the phrase was sarcastic, the normal default setting in the conversation of teenage boys. To say that something was no duh meant that it really was duh.

Teenagers, by the way, do not use slang just to be cultish and clannish, though that is one powerful motive. But the other motive is scientific and artistic. They do with words what they do with skateboards: push the envelope, experiment, screw around, try to see what they can get away with. In the process they make genuine discoveries, and the best of their work passes, completely unacknowledged, into mainstream usage.

Surgeons necessarily pride themselves on the terse precision of their speech during “procedures.” Half the thrill of a show like ER comes from the way those sexy doctors and nurses rattle off the long Latinate polysyllables at top speed, never missing a beat, while they rush a gasping Mrs. Osuna to the prepostfrontal absquatulator. But my father, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, once told us a funny story to the opposite effect. It seemed he was performing an operation that required blood to be vacuumed continuously from around the patient’s eardrum. During this procedure it often happened that a corner of the eardrum got sucked up in the tiny intake of the vacuum needle. When that happened the surgeon had to say something like, “Obstruct the vacuum line,” and it had to be done in a hurry. This time, though, words failed him, and he gasped out, “Ah—ah—ah— do it to the thing!” No problem: the nurse squeezed the line, the eardrum was freed, and the operation continued.

But if such minimalism will suffice for efficient communication, why do we demand so much more of each other? For clearly we do. On a full accounting, even the most clipped and frantic speech will prove to have various frills, and the more formal the occasion, the more we insist that various niceties be observed for their own sakes. The erosion and compression of everyday speech are evident in the first place only because there is an antithetical principle at work, something that continuously reasserts the replete, fully articulated expressions. True, we will sometimes roll our eyes at speech that seems too meticulous for the context or company; but the typical case is the opposite: we demand far more of the speech act than is strictly needed for clarity. Rather, language itself demands it, for the insistence is built in to the constitutive grammar that we follow without ever thinking about it.

Suppose a second language speaker were to say, “Me goes home now, okay?”—an unlikely but possible utterance. We would take in the meaning without difficulty, but quite spontaneously register it as incorrect in various ways. That “Me” should be “I,” because—well, just because English obliges us to use different pronouns for the subjective and objective cases, whether or not we really need help discovering who did what to whom. Likewise, “goes” has to be “go,” even though syntax by itself already makes it very clear who is doing the going. But even “I go home now, okay?” will not quite satisfy the inner censor. Though “now” and “okay” make the time of the proposed going exquisitely clear, the native speaker still wants to hear “I am going” or “I’m going”—not the Neanderthalic “I go.”  Since that subtle distinction in tenses exists, we insist on its being used, so that we are not pestered by a fleeting doubt that “I go” is meant in an abstract or habitual sense. The implicit natural redundancy of the idiomatic phrase is preferred to the slight awkwardness of the jury-rigged substitute. Both are clear, but the “good English” phrasing is clear a few nanoseconds sooner, and apparently that matters.

But mere efficiency in the immediate case, even very expansively defined, does not really explain our drive for correctness. Rather, what is at work in our preconscious and conscious curmudgeonry—that universal tacit fussing over how things are getting said—is concern for the language itself. Correctness concerns a classic tradeoff between now and later, spending and saving, private use and public good. Driving the immediate nail may be important, but not breaking the hammer is much more so. In any particular instance, the distinction between I and Me or goes and am going or of and have or any of a million other nuances is less than crucial and can probably be dispensed with; at worst, the speaker may need to rephrase. But the fact that the nuance exists in the first place expresses a rough consensus that the language itself cannot dispense with it, that it is useful and sensible and ought to be retained. And since the language exists only as a huge set of shared conventions that must be observed with reflexive speed, there is no way to retain a nuance but to keep on practicing it, over and over. Thus in any particular transaction, a big portion of our effort goes to expressing and finding the meaning; but another big portion, perhaps even the majority, goes to the upkeep of the language itself, to practicing its various forms and habits in order to keep them and ourselves current. Like good sailors we drill and drill, keeping things shipshape and Bristol fashion, always implicitly looking to the future. When we disapprove of a usage, failure to get the meaning this time is usually the least of our concerns; instead the problem is that we have noted a bit of anti-social behavior, something that in principle, if widely practiced over the long term, would impair the ability of the language to do its work. It is as if we had spotted a litterbug dropping a gum wrapper. In this one area, in our spontaneous feelings about usage, we Homo sapiens are all surprisingly law-abiding, public-spirited, and thoughtful—and rather priggish, too, but there is every reason to forgive ourselves for it, given the huge benefit to society and the species. The question of how to create a reliably law-abiding human animal has vexed utopian reformers through the ages; their projects might have fared better had they noticed that, in this area, the human community is already as elaborately and indefatigably rule-bound as an anthill.

Of course it is true that languages change over time, and that the impulse to correctness often misfires in particular cases. The two facts, confusedly lumped together, are sometimes taken as evidence that prescription per se is a bad thing and can somehow be dispensed with. In this spirit the National Council of Teachers of English, apparently intent on foreswearing the red pen forever, once officially resolved that “Language changes constantly, and change is normal”—a declaration to which the best response is “No duh,” gold engraved, with four stars. If a thing exists at all, it both changes and resists change, very normally indeed. In the case of language, the resistance is accomplished by the individual speaker’s dogged impulse to restore the status quo, even if for him this means correcting isn’t to ain’t or have gone to of went, and even if those usages turn out to be perfectly standard a hundred years hence. Correctness is not any kind of final state, but a negotiation, a vital process, a horizon that always recedes. The teacher’s notoriously fallible Do’s and Don’ts attempt to enforce, not some changeless ideal of virtue and goodness, but the particular form the vast social compact of language has arrived at so far. The list is so fallible precisely because it concentrates on just those usages that are most contested and likely to change, but it is only such cases that require a teacher or a conscious grammar in the first place. The teacher is only doing a little more actively and consciously what all speakers do, and must do if the language is to exist at all: attending to form as well as function, structure as well as content. Telling her to quit because the language will change is like telling her to stop breathing because death is inevitable.   

Sooner or later, every bright child wants to ask her parent, and every bright student wants to ask her English teacher, the same thing: “If you knew what I meant, why does it matter how I say it?” Over the years teachers and parents have developed a canned and canting response to this question, one that tries to justify correctness by appealing on the one hand to short-term efficiency, and on the other, in an exasperating tautology, to social expectations. “Well, people can tell what you mean,” we concede to the child, “But they think less well of you.” With the student we affect somewhat greater pragmatism: “Well, yes, your meaning was clear—finally. But it was a struggle to get to it. I had to re-read the sentence, and this distracted me from your argument. And of course—” with a shrug, a cocked eyebrow—“such mistakes create a poor impression.”

We get away with such answers because the question was half-hearted in the first place, or at best asked in a spirit of purely theoretical inquiry. The child and the student already know perfectly well that there is such a thing as correctness—as grace, as eloquence, as effectiveness, as making the sale—and are as eager as every other member of the species to track it to its secret lair. We need, therefore, to recognize our appeal to snobbery and its ugly twin, the argument from supposed practicality, as the great strategic blunders they are.

The correct answer to the child’s and the student’s question is not even so much harder than the usual answer. It is just different.

“Why do you need to say it better? Why? Why, you ask?

“You need to say it better because what flows in your veins is blood, not water. Because you are walking on your hind legs without the help of a tail. Because several million years ago your ancestors came down from the trees and strode proudly forth on the savannah, already beginning to chatter in some way that was ominously unlike the snarling of dingos and the peeping of rhino birds. Because four hundred and thirty- five days before you took the training wheels off your bicycle, you turned to your younger brother and said, “Not runned, stupid, ran!” Because no one has ever really discovered or defined correctness, but that has never, in the two million year history of our tribe, discouraged anyone from doggedly, ardently, madly questing after it, until you came along.

“You need to say it better, more quickly, more fully, more explicitly and gnomically, more poetically and more scientifically, more conservatively and more radically, because language is what Edward Sapir called “a great collective work of art.”  Because English as it comes to you is an incomparable patrimony, a huge reef containing the sedimented wisdom of countless previous generations, a Great Book replete with surprise and assistance on every page.

“Because you can be moved to guffaws by the discovery that a coarse-grained file is called a bastard, an unpopped kernel an old maid, and a certain kind of electrical connection male, or to a secret thrill of appreciation by finding that when you stand with sufficient imagination at the edge of a cornfield, they really do look like ears. Because the right word for that funny thing you do with your mouth to the trumpet is embouchure. Because a whangee is a bamboo riding crop, typically used by upper-level British civil servants stationed in the subcontinent. Because the grand legacy is as well worth conserving as the air, the water, or the forests, but can be conserved only in one way: through right use and continuous, spirited reinvention, both of which will ultimately change it past recognition.

“Because you have your own little corner of the cathedral to work on, a little oratory that is yours alone to emboss and bedeck. Because if you choose to follow the example of the Medieval artisan who contributed to one of the doorways of the great cathedral at Amiens, and decorate your patch with a froglike gargoyle committing autofellatio, that is your affair entirely.

“Because getting it right is no trifle, but a thing on which the fates of kingdoms have depended, on which laborious lives have been gladly wagered. Because the words in your mouth connect you to the distant past and the far future and to hordes of people you will never know. Because on the day the earth at last falls into the sun, you want the language to be even grander, richer, and more forbidding than it is now, a splendid compendium secretly holding every story that has ever been told.”    

That is the correct answer, and the one we should start giving to students and children, the sooner the better.