Correct English: a line in the sand [op-ed CCT 26 August 2008]

I’m sitting around a fire on the beach with a couple of writer friends contemplating the end of the world. Sort of. The blaze we stare into seems a good metaphor for the voracious computerization that is consuming writing as we know it (books and newspapers and such).

We lament the erosion of language itself, the slovenliness that seem inherent in blogorrhea.

Oh sure, we know things change. Monks laboriously copying manuscripts gave way to Gutenberg’s upstart device and writing survived — even got better some say.

But one of us asks the inevitable question: Shouldn’t we monks of the present moment be drawing the line somewhere?

I was too young to have missed the threat to civilization represented by the retreat on the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. I am old enough, however, to have grown up with Churchill’s skewering of the sort of writing produced by the rule he had grown up with: “This is some nonsense up with which I will not put.” I understand it may not have been Churchill who actually said this, but that’s how my high school English teacher told the story.

It became my job and duty, taken seriously, to defend correct English against the rising tide of student ignorance. I got a lot of mileage red-pencilling insidious substitutions of “like” for “as.” I was the very devil on split infinitives.

What a shock it was when the grammar powers decided it was OK to split the infinitive. To my ear, splitting the infinitive was a more revolutionary act than splitting the atom, and just as destructive to civilization.

The years since then have been a story of scandalous mellowing. I’ve learned to shrug at the use of “like” for “as.” I even find the use in my own writing for the occasional comma splice. Or sentence fragment.

I spent years trying to educate my son out of the uncouth “Me and…(whichever accomplice)…” as a way of starting a sentence. As it turned out, he educated me about it simply by refusing to give it up. It took me a while, but I finally got how, these days anyway, his insistence on the incorrect is simply good manners. “My friend and I” may be officially correct, but to the sensitive ear, which all kids have as a requirement of kidlife, it has an “after you Alphonse” quality about it which sounds phoney and undemocratic.

Where to draw the line? Sometimes you find a disappearing form the loss of which will mean loss of a whole meaning. An example is the increasingly popular “begs the question.” The original (I’m tempted to say the real) meaning was a criticism of a questioner’s fairness and logic, as in the classic example of asking a man on trial for beating his wife, “How often do you beat your wife?” It was a breach in civilized discourse English teachers were instructed to alert their students to. (Thank you, Winston). These days, “begs the question” is most often used to mean simply “raises the question,” as in “the history of language begs the question: Why do we even try to maintain standards?” The fact that the new usage borrows the old-fashioned sound of the original for purposes of sounding fancy only makes worse the loss of a useful term.

Obviously, my inner monk is not ready to give up on that one. But with language, any line you draw is a line in the sand.

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