on the english language

As annoying and inefficient as it can be, I love the English language—it is my heart language. It is the language I think, speak, and pray. It is ‘the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible,’ according to one Professor Henry Higgins.

Henry Higgins is my hero. I love him. When we read Pygmalion in 11th grade English class, and there were four of us and four parts to read, I always read Higgins’ part. He’s the paragon of total academic competency and utter social uselessness. He is the caricature of the person I sometimes fear I am. So, of course, there is much commentary in the play on human interaction, healthy relationship, character formation, &c. &c. And, of course, I am going to ignore all of that for now, because I’d rather rant about the problem of the English language. As George Bernard Shaw puts it in the preface,

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. 

That is: there is something really flawed about the way we treat our language if we can grow up around and be taught by 98% native speakers and still speak & write at a level that would mark us as somewhat-less-than-fluent… or somewhat-less-than-literate?

I’ve been overly sensitive to language misuse all week, having emerged from the ‘University of Notre Dame English Major Bubble of Happiness and Good Grammar’ into the real world. Things like the sign outside the local psychic’s office advertising ‘Candles, Cards, and Incents,’ or my sister stuttering through conditionals like “If only I didn’t’ve… hadn’t’ve… didn’t not…” merit an eyeroll and probably a tongue-in-cheek text to a friend. Any misplacement of an apostrophe earns instant judgment. Any mispronunciation of a word provokes instant correction. And that does not just apply to my sister or some street sign written by a stranger. I can control it verbally, but in my head? It’s a good thing most of my acquaintances are not psychics, and I never met the sign-writer who is.

Perhaps my reading has not been too helpful. Between the acerbic Higgins and the decisive Claudia Kincaid, I am reading myself into characters, and projecting them onto myself. …So, yes, finally, after about 3 years of laziness and resistance to recommendations from multiple friends, I read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Yes, it is a children’s book. Yes, Claudia Kincaid might be the literary character most like myself I have ever read. I was struck to the core when I was reading her interactions with her younger brother:

‘Of all the sissy ways to run away and of all the sissy places to run away to…’ Jamie mumbled.
He didn’t mumble quite softly enough. Claudia turned on him, ‘Run away to? How can you run away and to? What kind of language is that?’ Claudia asked.
‘The American language,’ Jamie answered. 

Not only is this a perfect picture of how I respond to attempted insults (if they are not properly phrased, clearly the person insulting me is not intelligent enough to have an opinion that would impact me—so I shan’t waste time on the content of the statement when I could be parsing it instead), it answers my problem with as much sass as I could ever hope to pose it.

Leave the English language to the English. If I want to speak it properly, I’d be better off in York than New York, in Coventry than Cleveland. I can go on affecting the sort of archaic English that would effect an even snootier façade than I already have (and which uses ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ both as verbs, correctly, spiting every professor who disagrees with me). Or I can bow under ‘the American language.’ As Higgins says (not in Shaw’s depiction, but in the musical), there are ‘places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!’ Perhaps we oughtn’t to pretend we do.

And perhaps that’s the solution. If a spelling or grammar rule is useless to communicating effectively and efficiently, why do we stick by it? Why is asking my mother to ‘come to the store with Kristen and I’ any worse than asking her to ‘come to the store with Kristen and me,’ when clearly she knows exactly what I mean by the first? Why must I bother to comment on the ‘candies’ I like best, when discussing my favorite ‘candy’s’ is equally intelligible?

Pretty soon everybody would write like they speak, and they already speak according to the media they consume and the face they wish to put on to the world. To spell words the way we most often encounter them (and if that is in spoken language, to spell them the way we hear them) and parse our pronouns in whatever way comes fastest… that accomplishes the aim of grammar and spelling! It makes communication with other people who speak our language more natural, more uniform, and more intelligible. If the way we write is the way we speak, the people to whom we speak would be able to read our writing much more easily. You try to read a page of Shakespeare with the same speed and ease with which you read two pages of Facebook statuses. You can’t. He is using all of the rules of grammar and spelling—but his sentences are not natural to you. It is not your language.

Is English the language of Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible?

The last one is questionable, but let’s say yes.

Do we speak English?

Maybe not.

So... if people write like they speak, and speak according to the media they consume and the face they wish to put on to the world, how do we propose to achieve any sort of consistency in the colloquially-born ‘American’ language? We can’t. The segments of the English language would stratify and soon become as foreign to each other as Chaucer and Nicki Minaj. Each slang would solidify into its own language. I think George Eliot caught the conundrum in Middlemarch, even then, 150 years ago:

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class… correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Perhaps the reason we pretend to have grammar and spelling rules is to prevent a second Tower of Babel. If we let them go, we would soon have not one but 20 American languages. Worse, we should be as clearly marked by and forever relegated to the language we were born into, not in the way a backwoods Southerner is now marked from a highbrow New Englander, but in the way a Russian-speaking peasant would have been marked and divided from a French-speaking aristocrat, living 5 miles apart from each other.

Maybe I ought to stop correcting my friends and acquaintances anyway. As long as we all recognize that my English is the correct one, you can deviate all you like…

Just kidding.

Did I mention I’m tutoring ESL this summer? I’ll be putting some effort forth to find the line of ‘grace and truth,’ as well as solidifying exactly what that ‘truth’ is. My great-uncle tutors ESL students in accents, and he has identified some weaknesses of mine as far as basic pronunciation goes—and goodness knows I like to end sentences with prepositions. So maybe I’ll end the summer speaking better English than I do now, and being more gracious to those who don’t. That would be nice.


PS- I am making good progress on the Unalterable List Of Katie's Goals Which Will Be Accomplished... and then some. Behold, the books I have completed since leaving school last Saturday (and please nobody tell my English professors that I do things like this willingly, or they might do silly things like ask me to read Wives and Daughters in 4 days):

Look for thoughts on that last book I mentioned, sometime later this week!