The way we should speak

Joan Acocella on Henry Hitchings' study of proper English and the ongoing war between prescriptivists and descriptivists. Money quote:

In the prescriptivists’ books, you will find that, contrary to Hitchings’s claims, many of them, or the best ones, are not especially tyrannical. Those men really wanted clear, singing prose, much more than rules, and they bent rules accordingly. White, addressing the question of “I” versus “me,” in “The Elements of Style,” asks, “Would you write, ‘The worst tennis player around here is I’ or ‘The worst tennis player around here is me’? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment.” Kingsley Amis, for all his naughty jokes, is often philosophical, even modest. His preference for “all right” over “alright,” he tells us, is probably just a matter of what he learned in school. But it is Fowler, that supposedly starchy old schoolmaster, who is the most striking opponent of rigidity. In his first edition, he called the ban on prepositions at the end of a sentence “cherished superstition,” and said that those who avoid split infinitives at the cost of awkwardness are “bogy-haunted creatures.” Even more interesting is to watch him deal with matters of taste. One of his short essays, “vulgarization,” has to do with overusing a fancy word. It’s wrong to do this, he says, but “Nobody likes to be told that the best service he can do to a favourite word is to leave it alone, & perhaps the less said here on this matter the better.” This almost brings a tear to the eye. He doesn’t want people to lose face.

The linguistic pedants among us (or, in Acocella's parlance, 'prescriptivists') ardently tie themselves to the insane notion that there is a 'correct' way to speak and write, and that there are a number of 'rules' to be followed in performing either of these elementary tasks. Though the absurdity of a rulebook on the subject is entirely self-evident, I will offer this thought, by way of the marvelous Stephen Fry: the way we are linguistically is comparable to a great degree with the way we are sartorially. He means that while there may be conventions to be followed in each ('sometimes, always, never' in fastening suit buttons; 'I before E except after C' in spelling), the strictness of one's adherence to those so-called rules is entirely dependent on circumstance and company and the kind of behavior particular circumstances demand. There is no right or wrong language in the same way that there are no right or wrong clothes. Anyone who expresses themselves with originality ought to be celebrated rather than scorned.

Like most in my circle of scholastic cohorts, I find it rather difficult not to wince, cringe, and shudder when someone utters 'expresso' or aspirates the word 'aitch', not to mention 'mispronounciation' and other vulgarizations. But I try desperately to dismiss any contempt for the speaker and accept that, actually, it doesn't matter if 'less' is used where I would have said 'fewer', or 'disinterested' where 'uninterested' is the textbook-prescribed term. Oh, well. Nobody's perfect and so on. Everybody — and I mean everybody — makes mistakes, so we may be well advised to keep our stones well out of reach lest we be confronted with mortal grammatical sin. There have been a couple of regrettable incidents of my own I'd like very much to remedy or forget. And it's those mistakes that teach us all to be slightly less pedantic in our own way, even if pedantry is a particularly difficult habit to kick.

(Image: "What the plain-English manifestos have been to Britain, 'The Elements of Style,' by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, is to the United States. Strunk was an English professor at Cornell, and 'The Elements of Style' began life as a forty-three-page pamphlet that he wrote in 1918 and distributed to his students in the hope of reforming what he saw as their foggy, verbose, and gutless writing." Source.)