English and It's Discontents

English and Its Discontents

            “Every time someone says ‘whom,’ I reply, ‘Whom? Meem?’”  Those were the words of my college Shakespeare professor regarding grammar and usage. He continued, “We follow these rules only because Eighteenth Century pedants (he used a more colorful word than “pedants”) wrote grammar books.” This comment came after someone asked about English usage in Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Julius Caesar Marc Antony describes Brutus’s stab wound as “The most unkindest cut,” which violates our rules for comparing adjectives. We have been taught to write or say either “most unkind” or as Microsoft Word instructs, “unkindest.”

            Did our usage rules really come from Eighteenth Century pedants? In part they did. Next question, why did the pedants write grammar books and where did they get their rules? Grammar books appeared when men found out they could make money in an emerging market, in this case the one created by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Of humble origins and not formally educated like the gentry, wealthy bourgeoisie bought the trappings of culture as the nouveau riche of our day do.

To formulate a set of rules, grammar book writers looked to ruling class usage and to Latin, then considered to be superior to all other languages. After all, educated people knew Greek and Latin. So now when we learn what has come to be called Standard English – we used to call it good or proper English – we are actually learning to speak ruling class English.

            The most annoying rules created by the grammar book pedants, which most people now ignore, come from Latin: we are supposed to say, “It is I” not “It’s me” because a pronoun following a linking (or copulative) verb (“is” a linking verb) must be in the nominative (or subjective) case. “I” is nominative, “me” objective (or accusative, as Latin students may remember). Another rule very difficult to follow: never end a sentence with a preposition, to which Winston Churchill is said to have replied, “This is something up with which I will not put.” Then there’s the rule about split infinitives. An infinitive is “to” plus a verb. An infinitive is split when a word or phrase is inserted between “to” and the verb. With some expressions following this rule is impossible. For example, “We hope to more than double our profits this year.” Inserting “more than” between “to” and “double” splits the infinitive.

            The problem with using Latin as a model for English grammar is that English’s antecedents are not Latin but varieties of German. Germanic tribes from the North German Plain, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, conquered the British Isles around the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, A.D. Our English developed from the Germanic languages they spoke. Angles lived in “Angle-Land,” which became England where English was born; and while contemporary English contains many Latin borrowings, as well as borrowings from French and other languages including American Indian dialects, linguists call those borrowings lexical, not grammatical. English is not grammatically Latin.

            Having said all that, and even though I love to make fun of usage rules, I believe that following sensible rules improves communication. Just as standardized spelling, developed as a result of printing and increased literacy, helps English speakers understand each other better, so do rules of usage. They fine tune understanding, for example, the differences between “uninterested” and “disinterested” or “imply” and “infer” or the universally misused and misunderstood words “affect,” “effect,” and “impact.” Also, learning grammatical structures makes it possible for people to learn to write and punctuate clearly, for example, rules such as this: “When an adverb clause begins a sentence, follow it with a comma. When it ends a sentence, no comma is required.” Obviously, people can’t understand this rule without knowing about adverbs and clauses. Unfortunately, most people either forget or never learn these English basics; nevertheless, proper form improves communication in writing and speaking.

In any event, widespread language lapses from Standard English don’t bother me because I don’t want to be a language policeman (political correctness in English bothers me a great deal, but addressing that requires another long article). More importantly, I value great literature with its infinite variety dialects and usages, and also the wonderful variety of English dialects spoken in America and throughout the English speaking world. I’m sad that many of us have had regional and cultural dialects educated out of us. Now, if I want to hear the English dialect my grandparents spoke, I must travel to isolated places like Smith or Tangier Islands in the Chesapeake Bay. I regret the loss; the broad midland English of the evening news now spoken by many Americans lacks the variety and richness of regional dialects, which I would much rather hear. To this end I’m thankful to country music for keeping Sixteenth Century Scotch-Irish accents alive.