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1. Maybe academics aren’t so stupid after all

By Peter Elbow


People who care about good language tend to assume that casual spoken language is full of chaos and error. I shared this belief till I did some substantial research into the linguistics of speech. There’s a surprising reason why we — academics and well-educated folk — should hold this belief: we are the greatest culprits. It turns out that our speech is the most incoherent. Who knew that working class speakers handle spoken English better than academics and the well-educated?

The highest percentage of well-formed sentences are found in casual speech, and working-class speakers use more well-formed sentences than middle-class speakers. The widespread myth that most speech is ungrammatical is no doubt based upon tapes made at learned conferences, where we obtain the maximum number of irreducibly ungrammatical sequences. (Labov 222. See also Halliday 132.)

Our language as it’s spoken / words by Geo. W. Day ; music by F.W. Isenbarth. c1898. Source: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

But just because so much spoken language is incoherent and ungrammatical, that doesn’t make it useless for writing. Careless casual speech may be too messy for careful writing, but it happens to be full of linguistic virtues that are sorely needed for good writing. For example, speakers naturally avoid the deadening nominalizations and passive verbs that muffle so much writing. Try asking students what they were trying to say in a tangled essay that you can’t quite understand: they’ll almost always blurt out the main point in clear and direct language.

In the past, I’ve been interested in the wisdom that can be found hidden behind incoherence. But now I want to explore the wisdom revealed by incoherence itself, a particular kind of incoherence that is especially characteristic of academics. That is, I’m not talking about little interruptions that so many literate people make to correct a piece of careless “bad grammar” that slipped out of their mouth. No, the chaos that bedevils the speech of so many academics takes the form of frequent interruptions in the flow of speech — interruptions that come from imperious intrusions into our minds of other thoughts. Before one sentence is finished, we break in with “well but, that isn’t quite it, it’s really a matter of…”). Academics often can’t finish one sentence or thought before launching into a related one. (“Elections tend to favor those who… You know what’s interesting here is the way in which political parties just… Still, if you consider how political parties tend to function…” and so on.) Alternatively, we drift into sentence interruptus: a phrase is left dangling while we silently muse — and we never return to finish it.

When we academics were in graduate school, we were trained to write badly (no one put it this way of course), because every time we wrote X, our teacher always commented, “But have you considered Y? Don’t you see that Y completely contradicts what you write here.“ “Have you considered” is the favorite knee-jerk response of academics to any idea. As a result, we learn as students to clog up our writing with added clauses and phrases to keep them from being attacked. In a sense (a scary sense), our syntactic goal is create sentences that take a form something like this:

X, and yet on the other hand Y, yet nevertheless X in certain respects, while at the same time Y in other respects.

And we make the prose lumpier still by inserting references to all the published scholars — those who said X, those who argued for Y, those who said X is valid in this sense, those who said Y is valid in this other sense.

As a result of all this training we come to internalize these written voices so that they speak to us continually from inside our own heads. So even when we talk and start to say “X,” we interrupt ourselves to say “Y,” but then turn around and say “Nevertheless X in certain respects, yet nevertheless Y in other respects.” We end up with our minds tied in knots.

It’s tempting to laugh at this — and I try to smile good-heartedly when people make fun of my speech. After a recent talk, a listener said to me, “Peter, you never completed a single sentence.” But it’s time for the worm to turn. Finally I want to try to stick up for my linguistic disability. I want to suggest that it comes from a valuable habit of mind. It’s the habit of always hearing and considering a different idea or conflicting view while engaged in saying anything. Too many things seem to go on at once in our minds; we live with constant interruptions and mental invasions as we speak. We are trained as academics to look for exceptions, never to accept one idea or point of view or formulation without looking for contradictions or counter examples or opposing ideas. Yet this habit gets so internalized that we often don’t quite realize we are doing it; we just “talk normally” — but this normal is fractured discourse to listeners.

This linguistic problem comes in two flavors. The first is characteristic of strong-minded, confident academics who tend (especially after they get tenure and have published some books) to have few doubts about their own views. Strong-minded people like this can be incoherent in speech because they constantly think about criticisms that could be leveled against their idea. They constantly interrupt themselves to insert additions or digressions to defend what they are saying against any criticism. Sometimes the digression gets even longer as they move on from simple defense of their idea to an active attack on the criticism. This is a mind constantly on guard. Here is one philosopher’s ambivalent praise for the ability of a highly-respected philosopher to write steel-plated prose:

The argument is heavily armored, both in its range of reference and in the structure of its sentences, which almost always coil around some anticipated objection and skewer it; [Bernard] Williams is always one step ahead of his reader. Every sentence… is fully shielded, immune from refutation. Williams is so well protected that it is sometimes hard to make out the shape of his position. The sentences seldom descend to elegance, and lucidity seems less highly prized than impregnability…” (McGinn 70)

But there’s a second flavor of linguistic incoherence that comes from what seem like weak-minded, wishy-washy academics. Their sentences are confused because it seems as though they can’t quite make up their minds; they are characteristically tentative and tend to undermine what they are saying by being unable to resist mentioning a telling criticism. I have a special sympathy for this flavor of incoherence because I suffer from it. It comes from a tendency to feel loyalty to conflicting points of view. As soon as I start to say X, my mind is tickled by the feeling that Y is also a valid point of view. “Maybe I’m wrong. Uh oh. I can’t quite figure out what I really think. Should I change my mind?”

I want to argue that there’s something valuable here. (Let’s see if I can make this argument without being too be weak-kneed about it. I don’t want to do you the favor of mentioning the vulnerable points.) I want to celebrate the mental ability to feel the truth in conflicting ideas. It’s a habit of mind that can help people avoid being dogmatic or narrow-minded. When I say something and someone gives a reason why I’m wrong, I often feel, “Oh dear, that sounds right to me. How can I be right in what I was trying to say?” I can be left in mental paralysis. But I want to argue that this is a frame of mind that can help people move past either/or conflicts and transcend the terms in which an issue is framed. “I believe X. Yet Y seems right. How can that be? What should I think? Let’s see if I can reshape the whole discussion and find a different point of view from which both X and Y are true?” Surely this is an important way in which genuinely new ideas are born.

In short I’ll be less apologetic about my inability to explain an idea clearly and forcefully. And besides, it was this ineffectuality in speech that led me to take writing so seriously. Nevertheless, the habit of constant interruption invades my writing too and makes me have to revise interminably. If I want strong written words that readers will hear and take seriously, I need coherent, well-shaped prose. For this goal, it turns out that the unruly tongue comes to the rescue. My tongue may breed incoherence when I let it run free, but if I take every written sentence and read it aloud with loving care and keep fiddling with it till it feels right in the mouth and sounds right in the ear, that sentence will be clear and strong. Why should the tongue make such a mess when given freedom to speak or draft, yet be able to craft strong, clear sentences when used for out loud revising? That’s an intriguing mystery that I’ve had a good time trying to explore.

Peter Elbow is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and former director of its Writing Program. He is the author of Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, Writing Without Teachers, Writing With Power, Embracing Contraries, and Everyone Can Write.

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2. June Ends (and so did May)

By Anatoly Liberman

This month I again spoke on MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) and, as always, received many questions. During the hour at my disposal I could address only a few of them. The gleanings for June will incorporate answers to our correspondents and listeners, but I don’t want to make my summer posts unbearably long and will divide the answers into two parts. Part 2 will appear next week, which is a blessing in disguise, because the next gleanings will have to wait until August 26. Today I will deal with general questions.

Language history and colonial languages. American English is a colonial language, a circumstance that explains its conservative character. But American English is full of new words. How does this fact tally with my statement? (This is the question I received.) “Conservative” refers mainly to pronunciation and grammar. In colonies, the speech of the settlers also develops, because change is the law of language, but it tends to preserve (perhaps conserve would be a better term) many features brought to the new home from the old country. A glance at Pennsylvania Dutch (Dutch here means “deutsch,” that is, “German”), Louisiana French, French in Quebec, the Spanish of Latin America, and Modern Icelandic in comparison to Norwegian will reveal the conservative nature of all those languages. With regard to English, a few facts can be cited. Despite the regional differences, most Americans sound their r’s in words like part, pert, hurt, girl, and the like; lorn (still recognizable from lone and lorn creature and from forlorn) and lawn are not homonyms in their pronunciation. British English lost its postvocalic r’s since the days of the colonization of North America, while American English still has it. In British English, cask, glass, path, and so forth have the vowel of father and Prague. The pre-17th-century norm required the vowel of bad in all of them, and this is what we have in American English. Anyone who will compare the grammar of the Authorized Version of the Bible with the grammar of American English will notice numerous similarities that are not shared by that translation and present day British English. The suggestion from a listener that the pronunciation of Spanish in Latin America may stem from the resistance to the norm of the old country has little ground. Sounds develop according to the laws over which speakers have minimal or no control. By contrast, words are not subject to mechanical laws. They come and go, and speakers are able to accept or reject them consciously. In American English we find many words that were at one time current in British dialects and later disappeared, and hundreds of words have been coined on American soil, but they shed no light on the opposition avant-garde versus conservative as it is understood in this context.

Does the term American language have justification? Languages cannot be always delimited on linguistic grounds. No doubt, English and Japanese are different languages. But what about Swedish and Norwegian? Russian and Ukrainian? Sometimes such questions become heavily politicized. Mutual intelligibility is not the only criterion here. In most cases Swedes can understand Norwegians, but according to our classification, they speak different languages. Swiss German is vastly different from the German in its standard variety (for example, as it is taught to foreigners), and so is Dutch. But the Dutch speak a language of their own, while the Swiss emphasize the unity of their language and German. If a speaker from Lancashire tried to communicate with a speaker from Kent, both using the broad variety of their dialect, they would not understand a word. Yet we agree (and so would they) that both speak English. A similar situation holds for Spanish, Arabic, and even for some countries whose population is small and the territory not too great, Danish, for example. Consequently, the answer to the question about the American language depends on one’s personal predilections. H.L. Mencken, a brilliant journalist with a chip glued to his shoulder, preferred to think that the American language existed. It seems that the American variety of English would be a more appropriate term. English is spoken in many countries by many people. Some time ago the ugly plural Englishes was coined. This noun is disgusting, but the notion it captures is real.

Are there periods of accelerated and periods of slow language change? Although this question has been debated for decades, we still have no definite answer to it. The paradox of language development is that, apart from registering new words, we notice even epochal changes only in retrospect. Language changes through variation. Some people say sneaked, others say snuck. Once all those who say sneaked die out, the “harm” will be done. This won’t be an epochal event, but it follows the familiar model. We are more or less resigned to the fact that great upheavals happened in 13th and 15th-century English, but it is surprising to learn that in the days of Charles Dickens some vowels were pronounced differently from how they are pronounced today. Yet even in the course of the last 50 or 60 years, the British pronunciation of so, no, low has changed dramatically, and people who return to the town of their childhood sometimes hear the question: “Where are you from?”. (From the street round the corner. Really? You don’t sound like us. Their norm has changed, and the guest’s vowels have adapted to those of his new home.) Many attempts have been made to correlate language and societal change. To the extent that migrations, conquests, long wars, and revolutions result in great demographic changes (George Babington Macaulay spoke about the “amalgamation of races”), this correlation makes sense. But in many cases we observe curious things. In 1066 England was conquered by the French, and this fact determined many events in the history of English. For example, in Middle English, endings underwent weakening. But Germany was not conquered by the French; yet the endings weakened in German exactly as they did in English. An attractive hypothesis crumbles like the proverbial cookie. All this being said, it is probably true that in the countries where everybody goes to school and is exposed to the relatively uniform language of the media, sounds and grammatical forms change more slowly than they did in the past.

If meaning is determined by usage, how is it possible to state that something is right or wrong? A related question: “Some changes in language seem to flow from general ignorance of proper usage. When should we resist it?” I think right and wrong are a matter of statistics. Every novelty has to be accepted or rejected by the community. For example, some of my students confuse precise and concise (they think that precise means “short, compact”). So far this usage is “wrong” because it has not spread to the majority of English-speakers. If this happens, it will become “right.” In a highly literate society like ours, teachers and editors guard the norm and correct mistakes. Their work is useful, but they fight a losing battle. Wilderness always takes over. Some time later we begin to call the weeds a flowering wilderness and still later a blooming garden. Every innovation in the history of language was at one time a mistake. This is how language changes. Observing the process is breathtakingly interesting, but being part of it is sometimes depressing. In language, as in everything, it may good to be a little behind the fashion.

Should etymology be left to professionals, or is anyone allowed to dabble in it? People do not need permission to have ideas. Language and politics are two areas about which everybody has an opinion. This is natural: all of us live in a society, and all of us speak. Etymology cannot be guessed; it has to be discovered. The sad fact is that in so many cases the early history of words is lost and then the dictionary says “origin unknown.” But most people do not want to discover the truth the hard way. A professional etymologist has to spend years learning languages and their laws. Conversely, it takes no time at all to suggest that posh and tip are acronyms (they are not!). Sometimes under the influence of superficial similarities speakers change the words of their language (this is what is called folk etymology; like nose drops, it gives immediate relief but provides no cure). As a result, we now say shamefaced instead of shamefast and spell island with an s in the middle (several centuries ago, it occurred to some ill-advised Latinists that island is related to insula). Now these wrong variants are the only ones we are allowed to use. Language belongs to the people, and they do with it what they want. But the science of etymology, like any other science, should preferably be left to experts.

To be continued.


Anatoly_libermanAnatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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