Language+Sticklers

From today 's NY Times. It's worth going to the website to see the graphic on literacy-- @http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/guest-post-robert-lane-greene-on-language-sticklers/

March 8, 2011, 1:30 pm Guest Post: Robert Lane Greene on Language Sticklers You Are What You Speak – Robert Lane Greene

In my new book, “You Are What You Speak,” I devote an early chapter to the notion that “our language is in decline.” Perhaps most famously in recent years, Lynne Truss wrote a little book about punctuation, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” which sold in the millions (to Ms. Truss’s own surprise) and made her a household name (at least in language-nerd circles). What sold so many books, I imagine, was Truss’s tone, never less than urgent and sometimes downright furious: nobody knows how to punctuate anymore, and if we don’t stop the rot we’re doomed!

But Truss should be seen in historical perspective. She’s convinced that English is in decline today. So was George Orwell, who complained that English was “in a bad way” in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Half a century earlier, an eccentric Cornell professor given to gripping the lectern and repeating himself two or three times, forced his students to buy and read a guide to improving their writing. Half a century later, Will Strunk’s “little book” was edited by E.B. White into the now-famous “Elements of Style.” But this is by no means even a twentieth century phenomenon: in 1712 Jonathan Swift wrote that “our Language is extremely imperfect … its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions.” Lynn Truss, rather than having discovered a pressing new problem, is heiress to a centuries-long tradition of declinism. Millenniums-long, if you count other languages: Cicero complained that the Latin he heard around him was “disgraceful” in the first century B.C.

Could the sticklers be on to something?

Could the sticklers be on to something? One thing is clear: language is always changing. But educated people, and especially language pundits, cherish the traditional language they learned in their education. Change must be bad, they reckon, because the language they once learned in school was good. The logic doesn’t work, though; when a good thing changes it can become another good thing. Latin didn’t become grunting and gobbledygook over centuries of change that Cicero decried: it became French, Italian and the other Romance languages.

Perhaps the sticklers are on to something in another vein, though. To many of them, language today, even formal language, seems so slovenly. Once upon a time, politicians and other leading figures buttoned up their English in its Sunday best for public occasions. Speeches were an opportunity to show mastery of formal rhetoric. At the turn of the last century, William Jennings Bryan, known as a populist no less, could say “The humblest citizen in all the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring.” Try to imagine Sarah Palin complaining about “all the hosts of error” of the Obama administration. We now value spontaneity and authenticity rather than elaboration and polish. For some, this is decline. For others, it’s just change.

Finally, I think there’s a third thing sticklers misinterpret. They assume that language knowledge is getting worse because they’re seeing so much more language that seems incompetent to them, the apostrophes that drive Lynne Truss bananas (“tomato’s on sale”) to teen text-speak (“UR 2 KEWL”) that so many parents hate. But in fact, seeing more of this kind of thing could actually indicate the opposite of what sticklers think. Here’s what’s happened to illiteracy since the late 1800s.

Illiteracy among the population 14 years of age and older in the United States. Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Illiteracy has fallen from one in five people to almost nonexistent over a century and a bit. But “illiteracy” clearly isn’t a single on-or-off switch. It’s not just “you can read and write or you can’t.” Literacy is a continuum of skills. Basic education now reaches virtually all Americans. But many among the poorest have the weakest skills in formal English.

That combines with another fact: more people are writing than ever before. Even most of the poor today have cell phones and internet. When they text or scribble on Facebook, they’re writing. We easily forget that this is something that farmhands and the urban poor almost never did in centuries past. They lacked the time and means even if they had the education.

So a bigger proportion of Americans than ever before write sometimes, or even frequently, maybe daily. Naturally that means more people are writing with poor grammar and mechanics. Education is universal, and every texter and Facebooker is a writer. A century ago, a nation of 310 million engaged with the written word on a daily basis was unthinkable. Now its uneven results are taken as proof by some that language skills are in decline. That is far from obvious. We may just be seeing more of language’s real-world diversity – dialect, nonstandard grammar and all – in written form, whereas a 150 years ago those same people would never write. That’s something to celebrate, not to complain about.

Robert Lane Greene is a correspondent at The Economist, writes for the magazine’s Johnson blog on language, and is the author of “You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity,” published this week.