The study of language is not the study of etiquette, anymore than is the study of carpentry or surgery or flight. That is to say, when we study a language, and more particularly its grammar, we should be concerned not so much with how we appear to others, but with understanding the objective structure of the language we use, because how we put its elements together determines what exactly it is we are saying and implying. And that is not always clear even to ourselves when we overlook the connection between language, thought, and culture.
The mature study of any subject, even etiquette, includes both a science and an art, and determining the balance between those two forces has a long, sometimes inglorious but certainly continuing, history of hot and cold war. The language battle has been marked out between the prescriptivists and descriptivists, purists and nonconformers, those who believe there is one right way to write and speak, and those who believe we speakers and writers are the only ones to decide what’s right, if indeed there even is a right at all. In the concluding chapter of his Grammar and Good Taste, Dennis Baron summarizes that historical linguistic conflict like this:
As we have seen, language reform in America is nothing new. It has been with us since colonial times, and despite its past failures, it is as strong today as ever…. Like the purists of the past, today’s reformers play on our sense of linguistic insecurity, the feeling that many Americans have that their language is somehow not quite up to snuff, that it is out of control, riddled with errors, or simply unskillful and gauche. It is a feeling of guilt that is sometimes conscious, but more often not, an uneasy sense that our commas, both literally and metaphorically, come in all the wrong places.
Linguistic insecurity (indeed any insecurity) is a woeful condition to suffer, and we can drink a tall draft of warm cure for it if we can remember that the scientific half of the study of language, like the science underpinning any body of knowledge, has its definable elements whose names we can methodically learn and whose functions we can clearly observe with a little hard thinking which any of us can resolve to undertake. It does not matter that once English was written and spoken differently, and that the English of three centuries ago was not the English of today. This appeal to historical change is sometimes used in favor of the write-and-speak-however-you-like side in the battle, but those soldiers forget that we write and speak to communicate a meaning we assume is recognizable by others, which after all is why we’re writing or speaking in the first place. The palmy days of believing that asserting ourselves is truth enough are now well past their noon, as is the wish to learn how to keep in conformity with the hollow gestures of linguistic propriety. We are recognizing again that there is, after all, a truth to be understood or misunderstood. A simple example will remind us of this.
Say, for example, you go away for the weekend and ask me to water your garden. You are diligent about your vegetables and flowers, and when you return I say that I just watered the vegetables. Now did I mean that I only recently watered the vegetables, or did I mean that I watered only the vegetables, leaving the flowers alone for some reason? I just watered the vegetables versus I watered just the vegetables: is there not an intelligible difference between those two meanings, and a difference of some material consequence should you water your garden again too soon or too late?
Now many of us, many, many of us, would no doubt say the former when we meant the latter, overlooking, because of the simplicity of the circumstance, the technical rule that an adverb should stand immediately beside the single noun it intends to modify, and that if it takes another position, as it does in the first example, it intends to modify the entire predication (a construction called a sentence adverb), not just a single word. That’s the rule, that’s the way the objective science of the language as we have inherited it in the form we use it today requires if we incline toward preserving and conserving those techniques which will conduce, if we all agree to play the same game by the same rules, to precision to reduce the chances of ambiguity and unwanted consequence. As one usage guide puts it, “A misplaced adverb simply does not say what the speaker intended it to” (Evans and Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage). And is not being understood the intention we all have? Even the charlatans intend their lies to be understood.
But insecurity? Feeling unskillful and not in control? How long can one feel inadequate when, with some diligent application, we can learn a skill and master it confidently? And diligent might just be the right word here, for it means originally to value, to love, reflecting, as Merriam-Webster says “the fact that devotion can lead to energetic effort.” What keeps the battle raging between right grammar and wrong, good usage and bad is our reluctance to remember that anything that is intelligible, any coherent body of thought which makes sense by remaining self consistent, has a solid core of principles together with a pliable molten mantle of choices and changes to be made according to purpose and effect in a given circumstance. It is always the segregating either-or demand that gets us in trouble. Better is the both-and perspective, both understanding the rules through a study of the principles of language and achieving from that knowledge an insight into when those constituting regulations may, or even should, be overlooked for the time and circumstance and purpose at hand.
The antidote to fighting—with ourselves or with one another—is a kind of serious play, where a line of rules is respected in order to concentrate an energy that will rise to something higher. We might even call it an objective subjectivity of sorts, wherewith we can live out together what seems to be some of our deepest needs: being understood and therefore belonging. The author Robert Pogue Harrison puts it this way in his Juvenescence: A Culture History of our Age. He is speaking of how important it is to preserve the continuity of culture—the embodiment of our being with one another—generation over generation, and he has just referred to the idea of amor mundi, love for the world as the means to such continuity:
It is that love, and that love alone, that takes custody of the world’s future. Nothing serves to bind human beings together as a polity more intensely than a heightened awareness of world-belonging. Only a shared world offers people what their shared humanity needs most, namely a sense of cohesion between the living, the dead, and those to come.
Is there culture without language? I don’t think so. And that is one reason at least why we should care to understand it and understand it with care.
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