"What Makes Good English Good"

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!

Now to the post....

Hello faithful readers. So in my last post I pooh poohed UWO, and in this post I'm going to share with you something I wrote in college. Makes perfect sense. I just happened across it tonight, and thought it was worth posting because it's personal and I still maintain these ideals. It's even mildly educational. The paper references an article, which unfortunately I can't find a link to. However, I think you'll get the picture as you go along.


“And they says we ain’t good in English”

Ever since I first understood the concept of prescriptive versus descriptive grammars, I haven’t been able to assert myself as a surefire advocate of one or the other. It felt too much like politics to me: in some ways I’m a Democrat, in some ways I’m a Republican. However, after reading, “What Makes Good English Good,” by John Algeo, I think I can safely say that I would promote descriptive more often than prescriptive, if not always.

When it comes to English, I’ve always believed in “doing it right.” I’ve followed the rules of past teachers with the expectation of being struck by lightening if I were to falter: don’t repeat the same word twice in a sentence; be concise; omit words like “just” and “really,”; don’t start a sentence with “and,”; avoid the use of parentheticals (they detract from the flow, I’ve been told). While these are all fine suggestions, who’s to say that they make English better? It’s as Algeo said:  “There may be one or two trivial matters for which the sweat of English teachers has dripped so incessantly on the stone of real language that it has finally worn a small indentation […] but on the whole, not only are English teachers overworked, underpaid, and poorly educated, they are also ineffective.”

I’ve had my fair share of both wonderful and ineffective teachers. I remember them as individuals, but excepting my grammar teachers from 6^th and 9^th grade (and maybe I can add “my senior year of college” to the list), I can’t remember a single thing that I was taught otherwise.

I believe this might be because so much of English is subjective. Drawing from a real life example, the other day I was in a class and we were going over the rough drafts of our final projects, in which we were to write a review of a short story we had read and publish it to the class blog. The first group to have their assignment read and corrected suffered an ill fate: everyone in the class was adamant about having their say, and seeing the assignment become what they wanted it to be. We were an hour into class when I realized we were on page three of five, at which point I said, “Jesus Christ people. It’s a blog, not a dissertation.” I agree wholeheartedly with Algeo on this point: “Talk about clarity and logic in language is often an unconscious confession of ignorance and ethnocentrism.” While the blog may have been poorly written (though mostly it was just wordy), the brilliance of the ideas had not suffered, and the class was trying to correct something that wasn’t really wrong.

One thing I’m excited to have the opportunity to pick on is the cannon by which high school teachers must abide. Algeo argues that “the literary criterion suffers from several weaknesses. One is the difficulty of deciding which authors are reputable or best and which are not.” To this I ask: who said that Shakespeare needed to be at the top of the cannon? What about Chaucer? (Sorry Milton, I’ve never read you!) Shakespeare’s ideas are no better than Chaucer’s, nor is his writing. Both languages have their challenges that can be overcome with enough exposure. I just don’t think that it’s right to only teach high schoolers about one major author. I didn’t even know there were other major authors until I got to college. What a sheltered education I suffered.

Another outlook of mine that this essay and class have changed is the daunting feeling that the world is going to hell in hand basket. The world might be suffering economically or politically or whatever, but the English language is not a passenger in said basket. In the section titled “Stylistic Criterion,” Algeo declares that there really is no problem with the direction language has taken; it is not necessarily on the decline: “It is ironic that the demise of English should be predicted at a time when the language is being used by more people for more purposes in more places around the globe than ever before.” It’s possible I’m misunderstanding the true intention of the quote, but in all of my conversations, I have never judged anyone's ability to speak the language, but only their ability to communicate their problem or question. And shouldn’t that be the way of things? So much of writing is ambiguous. Try as we may, we’ll never truly know the intent of authors; we cannot be 100% certain that we understand that message the author means to convey. Language is faulty. Words mean different things to different cultures, races, genders. For example, I hate the words “fine” and “sure.” While the people who say them to me assure that they don’t mean them negatively, all I hear is negativity because that is how I use them. “Would you like to go out?” Well, not really, but, “Sure.”

I used to be exceedingly uptight about language; linguistic “shortcuts” (ilu, <3, ttyl) caused a sharp intake of breath, arms folded across my chest in a huff of annoyance at peoples’ laziness. My philosophy was: if language is the only means we have of effective communication, why wouldn’t we use it to the best of our ability? But it never occurred to me that simply communicating, in any way necessary, is effective and a worthy use of language. Of course there is a time and place for professionalism, but in day-to-day life, what does it matter how it is said as long as the message is clear? Plus, playing with language is fun. Kthxbai.