Everywhere and always, decade by decade, the debate about the rules of grammar flares up. Some say there never was a permanent set of rules which everyone agreed upon, others say the rules are there but no one knows them, and still others say, rules or not, no one should tell them how to write or speak: there’s enough hegemonic elitism already going around as it is. The problem is prickly, because wherever you might pick it up, you will feel the sting from both sides. We inevitably identify ourselves with the way we use our language.
Yet for all its subjectivity, the art of language still has its objective side. If it didn’t, words would have no stable meaning for any length of time through any context, and without persistent definitions, we couldn’t assemble a thought someone else could recognize. So somewhere between the extremes of license and prohibition there must lie a workable margin wherein you can tell me something and I can understand what you wish to say without having to puzzle it out. You are using words I understand and you assemble them in a way which the basic structure of the language we share requires at this particular historical juncture. The traditional idea was and is that the rules of grammar—the rules of any art—make for order, which is the precondition that lowers the probability of confusion and raises the probability of precision.
In this debate, therefore, we will be better served if we understand the arts—the art of language, of music, of painting, for example—to be skills which build artifacts to show forth one’s interior thought or vision, to carry out into the world what’s going on in the mind. Watching ideas play in our head and heart, we can’t say anything until we see what they’re doing. Creativity begins with this attentive but solitary, silent attending. But—when we begin to see those interior winds shape themselves into something recognizable, then we can start reaching for our tools to build a common structure for others to see what we see. When well made, those artifacts we assemble will have a recognizable outer form, so that someone else does not have to work quite so hard to understand the thoughts and emotions we have come upon. And if we believe that what we have seen is more than an idiosyncrasy, then we will naturally want to remove every obstacle which might stand in the way of being understood by someone else.
But besides being readily and precisely understood, there’s another reason to stay within a workable margin of accepted definition and usage when we write and speak, and that is how we mean what we say. Grammar and usage, that is to say, intrinsically involve rhetoric. My linguistic choices, for example, will reflect my achievements, grand or humble, in the art of language, just as the manner in which I play the piano, perhaps mistakenly striking two keys at once or saturating a melody with the pedal, will show my nonachievement in the art of music. What one can’t do, of course, is conclude that I am any less a person for being a lesser writer or musician. What one can do, however, is evaluate my artistry against the ideals of the art I am professing. Such objective standards are blessedly impersonal.
But art still is a joyous thing. It is play, it is a game. And is there any game without rules? Rules are not arbitrary regulations; they are ideals which of course, like all ideals, cannot be achieved and sustained in every attempt. And what play, what give there can be in approximating them is exactly what yields that margin between the martinet’s proscriptions and the freethinker’s iconoclasm. Circumstance and purpose will determine how close we need to stay to the center of that boundary channel. Discerning what register my language should be in—what degree of exactitude and what choice of words—is a regular part of the work of the art. And just as a musician will play more than one instrument, so the writer will hope to move freely among such levels of language according to place and purpose, not always observing every rule, but knowing what they are and when to look the other way and why. Arbitrariness is not art.
But none of this has to do with the moral worth of a writer or a musician or a painter as a person, as a human being. One might be a good writer and a lout, one might be a bad writer and a lout. But whether good writer or bad, lout or paragon, respect is due without considerations of background or education or social standing. So if you hear someone say, “Him and me used to work together,” make no judgment about that person’s character. But do know for the sake of the art of language that it should have been he and I.
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