When Illiterates Try to Read Between the Lines

I tried twice yesterday to get comments on a New York Times blog called “Moral of the Story” by a fellow named Randy Cohen.  The blog purports to be dedicated to looking at stories from the news through the lens of ethics. (Never mind that ethics and morals are two distinct things and that people who are ethical aren’t always perceived as moral while folks who are moral are oftentimes not ethical.) As of this writing, neither comment has made it through the censors, which, for the purposes of this post, is neither here nor there. The blog post in question concerns the recent public relations tug-of-war between David Letterman and Sarah Palin.

First, let me say that the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. I can’t really imagine a less important news story. The situation is essentially this: Letterman told a joke–in some eyes a rotten joke–poorly, and Palin reacted in an absurd manner. There is no winner in this tiff, especially not the great American public.

Sprinkled amongst the comments generated by this post were a number that berated Letterman for joking about Willow Palin being raped, a thing which he did not do. Being a lover of the English language and of reasoning as an avocation, I wrote the following as my second comment (the first comment is lost to history):

There is not only a semantic but a legal difference between rape and statutory rape. In the one case, one participant in an allegedly sexual act is unwilling. The act is forced upon that person without their consent, whether they have the legal authority to give consent or not. In the other case, a person is engaged in a sexual act at an age that the legislature has determined is below the age at which informed consent can be given. The person’s willingness to engage in the act is irrelevant. They are deemed too young to be trusted to knowingly consent to such an act.

Conflating the two does no one any good. In fact, it cheapens the harm done and the injury felt by the victims of rape, those who were unwillingly violated by another.  However, in this matter and for the sake of making a few third-rate political points, it is convenient for Governor Palin and her acolytes to muddy the two very distinct terms into one so as to misstate the intent and effect of the joke. And if anyone actually thought that Letterman was referring to Willow Palin when he made that joke, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got a dirty mind.

Finally, it is hypocritical to worry about protecting the children when both Willow and Bristol Palin have been repeatedly used as props and weapons by their parents. If the folks who are so worried about them are true to their word, they would find these kids a foster home.

(I have slightly revised this comment to remove spelling and other such errors and to amplify the argument in a couple of places.)

As I’ve trudged through life, I’ve been subjected to a long stream of numbskulls and dimwits who disparaged “book learning” in favor of “street smarts” and who decried the need for a large vocabulary (originally called the use of “twenty-five cent words,” inflation has them valued at somewhere around five dollars these days) and the subtle use of language. And yet the entire line of thinking that goes into jumping to the conclusion that Letterman was joking about anyone being raped shows exactly why book learning and a varied vocabulary and a subtle sense of language are virtues, not vices. For without understanding how words work, without understanding the difference between reasoning and believing, a demagogue can mislead and citizens are reduced to the status of cattle. (I made a similar point in an earlier post.)

Despite what is believed in some quarters, this nation was not founded by men who had faith in religious belief.  They had faith in the ability of humans to reason their way through problems.  They understood that reason elevated the member of a mob to be a functioning citizen.  Reason allowed them to be governed rather than ruled.

The Meridian Post

Speaking of language, there is a faux pas that has long made me cringe, but which reached its apotheosis in a voicemail message I received yesterday from Comcast.

You see, one of the ignorant things people do with English is that they talk (and usually write) about scheduling some event at 12 a.m. or 12 p.m.  Now, this is wrong on two counts.  First, what they don’t understand is that “a.m.” and “p.m.” are abbreviations for two terms in Latin, ante meridian and post meridian.  Meridian means noon, ante means before, and post means after.  The problem with this is that when people say “12 p.m,” they are saying that the time specified is 12 hours after noon, and since what they usually want to say is “noon,” they are wrong by 12 hours.  Noon can be neither 12 hours before or after itself.  Midnight can be either.

Which brings us to the other problem.  There already exist two easy, common words for these times:  noon and midnight.  If one wishes to refer to the time in the middle of the day, all one need do is say “noon” or “12 noon” (which is redundant but acceptable) or write “12 N.”  For the time at the middle of the night, the formulations would be “midnight,” “12 midnight,” or “12 M.”  Easy, n’est pas?

I’ve become more forgiving concerning the evolution of our language as I’ve grown old and weary.  I used to be against the use of “hopefully” in place of “I hope” and still try to maintain that standard personally, but have come to realize that the battle is lost.  Usage has won out over the strict adherence to what are, ultimately, arbitrary rules.  People hear “hopefully” and understand “I hope” without missing a step, and English is more than elastic enough to absorb it.

And one of the problems with “12 a.m.” and “12 p.m.” is that there lurks in them a small element of confusion.  Which is which again?  I’ve seen uses of both for both noon and midnight.  Sure, it is generally the case that people will use “12 a.m.” for midnight and “12 p.m.” for noon, but isn’t there always a moment in reading such a thing in which you stop and ask yourself, quickly, silently, which is which?  This is never the case with noon and midnight.  They are clear, easy, and unpretentious.

And what brought this confusion into final focus for me, what has turned this more into a cause than simply an irritation was the message I got from Comcast.  The recorded lady very helpfully wanted me to know that Comcast was upgrading the lines in our area and that this would improve our service.  Good enough.  I couldn’t be happier.  However, she went on to inform me that these improvements would happen sometime after “12 a.m. midnight.”  And while I did get a good laugh out of how idiotic this formulation was, I knew also, in my soul, that it was time for action.

I’m not sure yet what sort of action this should be.  I’m a proponent of both nonviolence and basic manners, so slapping offenders across the face and saying “Don’t be stupid; it’s midnight” doesn’t seem like the proper way forward.  I would love to hear some useful suggestions.

In the meantime, I would appreciate it if anyone who reads this post would make a small effort to use “noon” and “midnight” when they have the chance and if they would also spread the word.  You just might end up saving some bureaucrat at Comcast a packet of embarrassment.

What the H?

The President’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court has raised one issue that I hope all of us–Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, apostate and true believer–can agree on.  There is no reason to use the article “an” before every word that begins with the letter H.

Traditionally, politicians and pretentious people everywhere have been in the habit of proclaiming everything from the invasion of a country to the crossing of a street as being “an historic event.”  But it isn’t.  And even on those rare occasions when it is historic, it is “a historic event,” not “an.”   And now, thanks to Judge Sotomayor being a Latina, we are being pelted with the usage “an Hispanic,” which seems to me to be fairly new.  “A Hispanic” was always good enough when we were talking about illegal immigration.  Now that someone whose forebears spoke Spanish and lived in the New World (I think that is the working definition of Hispanic) has been called to serve at the highest level of our judiciary, the unconscious decision has been made to elevate her ethnicity to the level of an “an.”

The rule for whether we use “a” or “an” before the word it modifies is guided by sound, not letter.  It is a function of speech, not print.  Typically, this choice is easy.  If the word starts with a consonant sound, use “a.”  If it starts with a vowel sound, use “an.”  Not hard.

Except with H.  Because H comes to us in two states:  aspirated and unaspirated.  That means that sometime you pronounce it and sometimes you don’t.  Therefore, while it would be correct to say “an hour,” it is instead correct to say “a historic,” “a Hispanic,” “a hard time,” “a hermit,” “a harangue.”

People get confused over this because, in the 18th century, the common usage was “an historic.”  This was because, at the time, history was pronounced ‘istory, the way that a modern Cockney might.  Now, however, we pronouce the H, and pretentious people, who have a tendency to think that just because something is old, it must be right, get confused because they are unsure of themselves.  And so, they err on the side of hypercorrectness.  (That would be “a hypercorrectness,” by the way.)

Let the nomination of Judge Sotomayor move forward as it may.  I actually have no opinion about it one way or the other.  But please, let it go forward as a historic nomination of a Hispanic woman.  She and the language deserve no less.

The Elements of Style, Not Steel

In reading an article in The Times this morning concerning the 50th anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, I reflected on a blog post I wrote a little over a year ago in which I discussed the effect the so-called “little book” had on me as a writer.  It was a small stroll down memory lane inspired, at the time, by a slight detour.  I had read a blog post by Paul Krugman in which he danced a piroette on the wonders of George Orwell’s essay about clarity in writing, “Politics and the English Language,” and I ventured the opinion that not only might Orwell’s essay perhaps not have been “the best essay on writing ever written,” but was, at least in my case, one of the best sleep aids I had ever encountered.  Some days later, I noticed on the dashboard for this blog that there was a link incoming to that post.  It connected to some website devoted to Orwell, and the author of the link added one of the “rules” from The Elements of Style in which E.B. White enjoined the nascent writer to not “affect a breezy manner.”  Apparently my lack of enthusiasm had struck a nerve, and someone who lacked the courage to identify himself had constructed what he thought was a witty rejoinder to my slander against his hero.  That’s how things are done in the digital world.

Unfortunately for our Orwell-loving sniper, my piece, while playful in spots, was not written in a breezy manner, and he (or she; idiocy is not gender-specific) missed the point of a section that White referred to in the book as a selection of reminders.  This point was also missed in a recent article published in The Chronicle of Higher Learning by a professor from the University of Edinburgh called Geoffery Pullum, although, in fairness, Professor Pullum has more reasonable, compelling, and useful ideas to put forth.  Both seem (although I might be misinterpreting Professor Pullum) to be under the misapprehension that The Elements of Style is anything other than a collection of guidelines for the beginner and is not–especially after E.B. White got through with it–a polemic or manifesto.  Of course, they are not alone.  Too many thousands, including the folks who created the grammar wizard in Microsoft Word, have taken the Little Book too seriously.  They treat it as if it were holy writ, not merely some quick ideas that put forth the notion–the same one as put forth by Orwell, by the way–that clarity in the writing of English prose is a virtue.

Because Professor Strunk followed his own advice concerning the making of definite assertions, the early sections of the book do read like an extension of the Ten Commandments, but this can be overcome.  And the second section, the one dominated by White, is far less proscriptive, although, I guess, by the time that people get that far, they have been conditioned enough to jump when commanded that they unconsciously omit White’s advice to season one’s taste of his reminders with a pinch or two of salt.  It is long past time for everyone to relax a little and to remember that The Elements of Style is not a sacred text.  It began its life as a guidebook for college freshmen and not as a learned disquisition on the English language in all its complexity.  It is a style guide, and a decent one, I think, and entertaining to boot.

Now, two more things before I go.

First, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-Orwell.  1984 and Animal Farm are two of the best novels I’ve ever read, extraordinary in every way.  What I failed to make clear previously was that it was that one essay that put me to sleep.  If it is truly as great as Professor Krugman had it, then the fault is mine.

Second, Professor Pullum’s essay should be read by anyone who is infatuated with The Elements of Style and his words heeded.  I think he is right in just about everything he says except in his insistence on taking the book sooooo seriously.  It also seems to me that some of his notions, such as that “[t]he students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction,” are logically flawed and detract from his overall argument.   (Not that he’s arguing with overalls.  Whoops!  There’s that breezy side of me rearing its ugly head again.  For shame!  For shame!)  I think it would be great to see his essay published with the standard text as an afterword or something.  Everyone would benefit from a bit of scoffing, for there is no animal duller than a sacred cow.

Say What?

Let me start off by saying that no one holds Stephen Fry in higher esteem than I do.  In fact, even though he’s only a year-and-a-half older than I am, I still want to be him when I grow up.  And yet, despite my admiration and abstract sort of affection, I do not think him a deity and feel completely comfortable in disagreeing with him when the occasion calls for it.  And, unfortunately, this is one of those times.

In the most recent installment of Stephen’s podcast, entitled “Language,” he makes some statements concerning language and correct usage and such subjects that, while well-intentioned and well-argued, are wrong. This is not to say that he is completely wrong or that he doesn’t make reasonable points, however, the conclusions he draws are, I believe, mistaken.

Stephen’s main point is that language is changeable and malleable and that some are often too strict in approaching language.  It is not a compilation of rights and wrongs, and those who would nitpick every perceived error need to take up ballroom dancing or Parcheesi or perhaps even sex.  And I agree with this.  I, too, used to be an absolutist, but found over time that my absolutes didn’t always apply and weren’t always as solid as I had supposed.  However, Stephen goes on to assert a kind of feel-good doctrine in which all words and usages are equal and are merely an expression of the exuberance of language itself.  In truth, as in most facets of life, ignorance often trumps exuberance and many usages that gain currency are, to use the horse racing terms, by stupidity and out of laziness.

We’ve all heard a person, usually young, say something on the order of “he like said, you know, whatever,” and I would argue that this is not truly speaking.  It’s semi-organized grunting.  Just this morning, I read a blog post on The New Yorker’s website in which a young woman who works for The New Republic was quoted as saying,

“It was, like, ‘Do you want to take Monday off work to drive in Obama’s motorcade?’ ” Lear recalled. “I went, ‘Yes, absolutely. But who is this?’ ”

This was a presumably college-educated person talking to a reporter.  Is saying “went” instead of “said”  any more efficient a way of expressing the idea of communicating?  No.  The same number of letters and syllables.  Is “went” somehow clearer or even as clear?  No, because that leaves us with this as a possible sentence:  “She went, ‘She went.’”  No, it is mere dribbling, a childish lingo forged in the furnace of laziness.  When we consider the elegance and subtlety available to human expression, should we accept such palaver as being as good as anything else?  Nonsense.

Now, Stephen relies heavily on the ideas that language is innate in humans and on the Chomskian idea that thought and language are separate.  Now, both these notions are true.  As he points out, where no language is provided, new languages evolve.  And anyone who has ever observed a cat or a dog has seen clear evidence of thought.  Animals consider and anticipate, both of which must constitute a thought process of some sort.  In this he is correct.  However, Stephen does not take the process far enough.  For while thought can exist without language, reasoning cannot.  And reasoning is shaped by words and one’s use of them.  Let us consider, in the shadow of his brutal tenure, the administration of George W. Bush.  Has there ever been a better example of a person who spoke poorly and reasoned as well as he spoke?

This is not to say that everyone who is well spoken is also reasonable and of a like mind.  All the swirling influences of society and temperament affect such things.  But to send someone into that maelstrom without the weapon of well-honed language is to send them defenseless to be buffeted and drowned by information they cannot process and leaders they cannot interpret. While I am not a fan of George Orwell’s essay on language–it’s soporific effects made it almost impossible for me to drive after reading it–I do agree with the main point he makes.  He says, “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  And people who do not use language with subtlety and skill have no chance of cutting through the forest of propaganda that the average citizen finds himself in every day of his life. The young lady I quoted earlier went through the experience of driving a vehicle in the Obama motorcade on Inauguration Day without a scintilla of insight.  Her main concern was the celebrity of the people she drove, and that she spends her free time texting people instead of reading The Mill on the Floss, which she brought with her, is, I think symptomatic of this entire problem.

Stephen assails the language purists–and some of them are downright Puritans–by questioning their abilities with words.  He claims to know that they have no poetry in their souls, but I do not know how this can be proved.  It is a moment of bigotry in a remarkably unbigoted person, but we all have our faults.   In fact, I would dare say that the people who, by traditional standards, misuse the language are less likely to have poetry in them and that their misuse is liable to degrade any language to a point at which poetry is no longer possible.  Members of the military and politicians and football coaches are the leaders of an assault on language.  It is they who have given us “impact” and “reference” as verbs, two examples of a myriad of lead balloons that pose as speech.

Now, Stephen defends the verbing of nouns, and he has a point.  He points to Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is an example extreme in relation to the rest of us.  And however much Shakespeare liked to verb, he still did so selectively and strategically.  This is why he was capable of tabling, but not dooring.  And this is my problem with “impact” and “reference” as verbs.  In the case of the former, it is a disingenuous attempt to sound important and manly.  It has the same meaning as “affect,” only with a thick coating of pretension.  It is a strutting Spanish Captain of a word, veneered in braggadocio but empty inside.

“Reference,” on the other hand, is just plain unnecessary.  It has come to replace the verb the noun originally derived from (for we can noun verbs as easily as we verb nouns), the humble word “refer.”  I have yet to see what advantage “reference” offers.  It takes just as many syllables to reference something as it does to refer to it, and in the past tense, it actually adds a syllable more.  And there is something clumsy and clunky about it.  Meanwhile, “refer” is lovely in its short five letters.  The reason why “reference” has gained so much currency of late is that it sounds officious and pretentious, not because it is a better or easier word to use.  The person who references must be important, or so the speaker would have us think.  Since words should lead us toward reality rather than away from it, I can’t admit the usefulness of “reference.”

This is the problem with declaring all words to be “good.”  Linguistic egalitarianism hides the fact that some words are better than others.  They are less pretentious or more precise or more apt.  They reveal rather than hide.  Some soar and others waddle.  Some illuminate while others snuff out the light.  Simply because the language evolves through usage doesn’t mean that each mutation is a good one.  Some will survive and others won’t.  Some deserve to be euthanized.  It’s really best for all.

He also criticizes those who are forever on about punctuation and grammar.  Now, in terms of grammar, he just might be right.  In spoken language, grammar is more a matter of the ear than the mind, and in written language, we are often weighed down by rules that have no basis in practice.  Two of the more notorious examples are the prohibitions on split infinitives and in ending sentences with prepositions.  Both are rules devised by people in the 18th Century who were trying to make English work like Latin.  Which it doesn’t.  In Latin, infinitives are single words.  In English, they are two-word forms, such as “to split.”  and, in English, infinitives often beg to unequivocally be  split.  It’s a matter of ear.

Ending sentences with prepositions is another such nostrum and is foolish and prissy.  Sometimes a preposition just wants to make its way to the end of a sentence and if it doesn’t get there you end up with something along the lines of Winston Churchill’s famous (and perhaps apocryphal) parody, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”  Again, the ear is the guide.

However, in his insistent railings against people who are consumed with the proper use of apostrophes, he misses the point of punctuation and why it matters whether one tiny little squiggle mark is present or missing.  Punctuation is an aid not to the writer, but to the reader.  It has evolved over an expanse of time, and the point is to make comprehension easier and not just to give a bunch of self-satisfied prisses a means for feeling superior.  Let us take, since Stephen so furiously has, the lowly apostrophe.  It exists in three states:  before the final “s,” after the final “s,” and in place of missing letters in the middle.  Let’s start with its use with possessives.  As readers, it tells us one of three things.  If it comes before the final “s,” it means that the noun is singular, which can be of some use to know.  If it comes after the final “s,” the noun is plural, which can also be of use on occasion.  If it does not appear at all, then we know that the noun is plural and precious moments are relieved of the burden of trying to parse noun/verb agreement.  Its absence or misuse may not constitute a tragedy, but it is a help, both to the reader who wishes to not be confused and the writer who wants the reader flying through his or her work instead of having to puzzle over every possessive.

That people can get carried away with these rules of punctuation is undoubtedly true.  There are martinets in every field of human endeavor.  And there are those who confuse matters of style–such as in the use of serial commas–with the basic rules of punctuation, which exist only to aid us.

Here in the U.S., I’ve noticed a puzzling fashion in which people have signs made that use quotation marks quite wrongly.  For example, there is an auto repair place near us that has a sign hanging prominently that says “‘English’ spoken here.”  Now, quotation marks around a word in such a context usually denotes irony, if not downright sarcasm.  Were these folks implying that their English was not very good or a mere facsimile of English?  Or did they mean to have the word either underlined or italicized in order to indicate emphasis?  It may be pedantic to note the difference, but a difference there is.  And it doesn’t make me superior to those who made the mistake, merely more knowledgeable.  If there are, as Stephen would have it, no wrong words, is there no wrong knowledge?  Is all knowledge the same and those who would espouse a greater knowledge on a given subject pedants?  I think not.

There is a certain kind of snobbery that attaches itself to the apron strings of language.  Of course there is.  It is a human product.  And wherever humans go, there is pride and snobbery and ignorance and foolishness.  There is also knowledge and insight and reason and thoughtfulness.  We are strange creatures filled with loves and compulsions, interests and indulgences.  It is not, in my view, a burden to ask people to use language well–as well as they can.  It is a shame, however, to expect the least of them, to banish them to a land called Ignorance, to shield their eyes from the light of reason.  To write well, to speak well, to use the full vigor, power, and beauty of English is not a vice, and to ask the best of others is not a crime.

Ghoti

As February looms, I am reflecting on someone I used to be friends with who insisted on pronouncing it FE-BROO-WARY.  She was certain, based on the spelling of the word, that FE-BROO-WARY was correct and that FEB-U-ARY was wrong.  Unfortunately, the only error involved was hers.  Both pronounciations are acceptable, and FEB-U-ARY is actually preferred.  It’s always the first pronunciation listed, as it is in the entry on Merriam-Webster.

This sort of mistake is common, and it arises always from a common source.  Thanks, I think, to the practice of teaching children to read using phonics, people grow up with the idea that words in print are representations of sounds, which they’re not.  They are representations of ideas and concepts and just happen to often match the sounds of the words they represent.

George Bernard Shaw made this point while he was actually trying to refute it.  Shaw was quite the champion of reform of English spelling, and he used to ask what “ghoti” spelled.  After the dupe had been stumped, he would explain that it spelled “fish.”  “Gh” as in “enough,” “o” as in “women,” and “ti” as in any word ending in “tion.”  It was a stunt, and a clever one, but one that shows that the printed word is not so much the representation of sounds as the representation of words and their meanings and uses separate from the sound made when they are spoken.  In other words, printed words are meant to be read, primarily, and not pronounced.  Had we all learned to spell fish “ghoti” when we learned to read, it would represent the same concept.  The spelling is meaningless.  It’s the idea behind it that counts.

Another, related, thing I come across is when people use the possessive of any word ending in the letter “s,” even when it’s in the singular.  The correct thing to do is to add both the apostrophe and “s” after the last letter of the word, just as it is for words ending in any other letter.  “James’s” tells us that there is only one James.  “James’” tell us that we are dealing with more than one Jame.  It’s all about reading, not pronunciation.

As E.B. White noted in Chapter V of The Elements of Style, writers must assume that the reader is in trouble about 90% of the time, and one of the lifelines that we throw him or her is punctuation.  It replaces the subtle inflections and gestures and facial expressions that we use in conversation. It provides us with meanings rather than sounds, with a way to decipher the writer’s intent rather than his dialect.

We have standardized spellings specifically as a way to get beyond sounds.  In Shakespeare’s time, words were spelled, mostly, according to the way the writer or the compositor spoke.  Dialect and the vagaries of pronunciation produced a literature in which words were spelled every which way and often in several different ways by the same person.  And the reader gets a little bit more lost.

And so, let us not equate the spelling of February with its pronunciation and not worry about how many “s” sounds are needed for Cassamas’s.  What’s written is not always what is said, and what’s said is not always what’s written.  But that gets me off onto a whole different subject.