Your Own Language: Who Decides?

Who decides which version of English we speak? The list is long, but English teachers are not on it.

Everyone has a mental picture of teachers, good or bad, loving or fearful, and as small children we usually think of them as powerful beings. Teachers know better. They are the functionaries of a massive bureaucracy. They are told what to teach and what not to teach, out of textbooks they have no power to change. The only thing that keeps them from being serfs is that the same incompetence that characterizes the entire educational establishment extends to an incompetence at commanding obedience.

Teachers are told what to do, and then, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, they do what they can get away with.

Preachers used to have a powerful influence on language. You couldn’t say damn or hell in school. You still can’t say shit, although, merde, the Aussies say it all the time. Today preachers have been replaced by the purveyors of political correctness. Even thirty years ago, when I first began teaching, one of our textbooks had modified Tom Sawyer by changing Injun Joe’s name to Outlaw Joe. Need I say that it has gotten worse since then?

We have to decide for ourselves what to accept and what to reject out of what the world hands us. To a large extent, we all have to be self-educated.

I learned that early. I spent my first eight years in a tiny school where there were two grades per teacher. Half of each school day was under instruction; the other half was spent doing independent work while the teacher taught the other grade. By the time I reached high school I had developed self-reliance, and I had come to the conclusion that none of my teachers knew enough to teach me all I wanted to know. That was particularly true in English.

I didn’t want to talk like an Okie. More importantly, I couldn’t afford to if I was going to escape to the intellectual life I wanted. My salvation was Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which I read as a counterbalance to the simple mindedness of my textbooks. S and W was dated, even then, and is in considerable disrepute today. A glance at Wiki finds it to have a “toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity” and to be “the best book available on writing good English”. Strong opinions do tend to polarize, but at least they were the prissy opinions of learned men. There weren’t too many leaned men in Talala, Oklahoma. Besides, I was already arrogant enough to ignore anything I didn’t find palatable.

Writers have always been arbiters of English, but which writers? We would all like to sound like Shakespeare but, zounds and forsooth, who would listen if we actually did? If you want to write romances (God forgive you) you will need to master the rippling muscles and heaving bosoms style. If you want to sound like Hemingway, you will have to take a magic marker and scratch out all the adjectives in your dictionary. Even hard boiled writers eventually get tired of terseness. Robert Parker put these words into tough guy Spencer’s mouth, “I felt like I was trapped in a Hemingway short story. If I got any more cryptic I wouldn’t be able to talk at all.”

There are no infallible rules, grammatical or otherwise. That doesn’t mean anything goes. Somewhere in between rigidity and chaos, you will have to find your particular brand of English. And you had better choose well, because that (among many other things) will determine who is willing to listen to you.