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.