search this site

 

 

I’m a word nut, not a word cop. Nothing spoken or written in English is alien to my linguistic interest, except the fine print on packages of hemorrhoid medication and the writings of David Frum. Frum, like suppositories, wants everything Canadian to shrink.

Word mavens want to describe, not prescribe, how humans use language.

Some readers of my 11 books and visitors to my website urge me to include long lists of bad grammar, words misused, and condemnation lists of new words not in any dictionary, a sort of miscreants’ wanted poster. No thanks, folks.

Quarrelsome language pedants already have their ordained venue. Their fretful quibbles appear in letters-to-the-editor in many of our newspapers. You know well their peevish tone: “Proper English is in decline. I have been much troubled of late about the wanton use of the semicolon in the novels of Jane Urquhart. If only everyone would write and speak precisely as I do, the virginal purity of our noble tongue would be preserved in its ancient and pristine form.”

Well, first, virginity is something most healthy human beings don’t want to preserve forever, in spite of those misandrous spinsters at the University of Toronto who keep spewing out books praising the joys of chastity. Such glum dowds might better employ their leisure publishing dildo catalogues.

Second, there never was, nor is there now, a pure English. Our language began as a West Germanic dialect transported to England around 450 CE. Over the next fifteen hundred years this dialect grew into a language as it borrowed and was influenced by Old Scandinavian loanwords, Norman-French vocabulary, and scholarly Latin and Greek. English was — may it always be! — the great thief of tongues. Feisty and multi-dialected, this hard-scrabble jabber grabbed new words and neighbours’ jargon whenever they appeared useful or necessary to survival, as the holus-bolus import of French words into the Anglo-Saxon wordstock was necessary after the Norman conquest of England. 1066 and all that.

Word cops pine for an English mummified in amber, like some Jurassic mosquito. They pine for a golden age of unchanging literacy where perfumed verbal dandies exchange exquisite ripostes in Shakespearean blank verse, while outside their mullioned windows the profundum vulgum trudges to its loathsome chore of growing the dandies’ food, serving it to them, and cleaning up after the dandies have consumed it.

Word cops would like to stop language from changing. In a world where social change is fast and frightening, so they seem to say, we’ll carp and cavil and try to prevent English, at least as we learned it, from any alteration. The old men who deny global warming live in the same brittle cocoon of mind where amyloid plaques clot and obstruct brain paths and whimpering elders coo plaintively, “Don’t let anything change. It’s too difficult for me to deal with.” All new paradigms are anathema.

 

Teacher: One more new word, Millicent, and I shall have to stoop to glossectomy.

Wee Millicent: What's that, Miss Frimp?

Teacher: Cutting out your tongue. For your own good, of course, dear.

 

Here’s A, Like, Totally Fun Paragraph

One new use of a familiar noun causes some of these word nannies to drop their tortoise-shell lorgnettes in aggrieved dismay. It is this usage: “We had a fun time at the circus last night.” Fun is a noun, they bray, flustered. “It’s a fun movie.” Fun already has an adjective, they assert, their lips pursed, it is funny. Harumph! Yet, on all sides, literally millions of North Americans now utter daily sentences such as: “I’m looking for the fun angle in all this.” The English language is consensual. If people say it, it’s a word. It behooves dictionary writers to catch up, not speaking people to alter their speech because of what’s in or not in a dictionary.

We speak English. English speakers do not submit new words and usages to some arbitrary conclave of senile pomposities like those who sit enthroned at the Académie française where palsied presbyters are permitted to disparage the speech of French young people and to bitch about the way the kids speak French while these out-of-touch wrinklies fumble with their Depends fasteners. English has never permitted any such continuant enthronement of word cops. No parliament of verbal fascists shall fix the form of English. No language that is truly alive would do so. French does.

What words we use and how we use them in daily speech and learned discourse are the sole determinants of words’ legitimacy in our language.

Fun began as a verb, by the way. To fon, in 1300 CE in Middle English, meant to befool, to joke, to sport with, to cheat. Only hundreds of years after the verb became common, did the form fun emerge and find use as a noun.

Besides, there is nothing unusual in nouns becoming adjectives. It is part of many languages, and has certainly happened thousands of times during the course of the growth of English vocabulary. Let me give you just one fun example.

 

Cheap Knowledge

Today the word cheap is used only as an adjective meaning inexpensive or of poor quality. Yet it began as a noun. Omigod! From noun to adjective! How and why was this obscene metamorphosis permitted? In almost the oldest English we have, in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf probably written down between 900 and 1000 CE, there it is at line 4822 Næs ðæt yðe ceap to Þegangenne gumena æniðum. In Old English, another name for Anglo-Saxon, céap (pronounced chape)meant a place to barter, to buy and to sell, hence cheap is the first word in English for a market. Many things sold at markets are not of highest quality but of bargain price. A phrase developed in Middle English in which people said that an object for sale was ‘of good cheap’ or they used the phrase as an adjective or a predicate adjective in a sentence like “ ‘Tis good cheap,” that is, it is being sold at a fair price. From there it was but a step to saying “it is cheap.” And thus a noun had become an adjective.

 

a medieval market fair

The nitpicking verbal fussbudget may say: But that all belongs to a distant past. We don’t have any evidence nowadays of cheap as a noun. Oh yes indeed we do. There is a famous street in the city of London called Cheapside, first recorded in 1436 CE. The street is hard by St. Paul’s cathedral and it was the site or side of the principal market of London in the Middle Ages, hence its name Cheapside. Nearby side-streets show where submarkets were: Bread Street, Milk Street, Wood Street, Poultry, Ironmongers’ Lane.

 

a map of London, showing Cheapside and local streets

 

The Sandpaper of Time

Nouns turn into adjectives throughout the history of English. Words change their use in sentences. Our lives through time do not proceed without change, nor do our words.

If the spirit of a living language could give tongue to its quintessence, it would shout: “Alive from lips to lips of humankind I go awinging!” So said the Roman poet Ennius of his own poems – with a becoming lack of modesty. In that translabial exchange, living language “morphs” and “polymorphs,” in a roiling sea-change caused by usage through time by smaller and larger groups of speakers, often separated by geographical, political, and social distance.

Words are tissue. Words are used. Words grow weary in constant discourse. Words wear out like tissues of the body, abraded by the sandpaper of daily usage and the planing blade of time until they are flat, wan, bled of real meaning, palely loitering semantic nonentities. When you have called something “fantastic” for the one-thousandth repetition, that adjective has lost some of the meaning it conveyed the first time you used it. So we discard used words for newer verbal objects. That change partially produces dialects and varieties, hybrid speech and lively informal writing.

 

The Diversity of English is its Glory

The Protean habit of our sweet tongue is bliss to detect. Will we nab the shifting shadow of a new word or meaning, or will they evade us and slip slyly past to vanish in the thickets of unmeaning?

Multiplexity is one reason to study English. Its conquest of the earth is another. As for those complaining unspeakers of English, in frozen Thule or in tiefste Provinz or melting Ind, all who howl of its ubiquity, you would do better to race a relay with the wind, should you favour competition in the Futility Stakes. English is here to stay. If the language will not outlast the onset of parvenu Arabic guttural and bully Chinese singsong, still English seems likely to survive their first onslaught.

 

Language Change is not Shoddy Slippage

Change is programmed into the complex systems that comprise a language. It is inevitable, natural, linguistically healthy. The languages we can study through their history begin with small vocabularies and complex syntax and grammar, and then evolve toward larger vocabularies and simpler syntax and grammar. English has been so evolving for a thousand years.

The only languages that do not change are dead languages. Word cops want English to be dead. For when a language is all rouged and lip-sewn and pickled in formaldehyde like a stiff in a funeral parlour, why, then it will never present new words and grammatical ploys. The sclerotic word cops will smile. No horrid squirming new verbal life dampens the pristine cradle of their vocabulary. These fussy pontificators would enjoy life much more if they would embark on a study of some dead tongue, not Latin and Classical Greek which can be studied to see how “dead” languages can be “alive” in modern vocabularies, no, but — say— ancient Egyptian. Learn hieroglyphics instead, you defenders of English against change, and then curl up for a comfy evening with The Book of the Dead.

 

A Brain Pick?

Here is a letter bitching about someone who has had the effrontery to use a new verb. The miscreant had written: “We’ll brainpick in the morning session, and present formal reports in the afternoon.” To brainpick is a fresh, terse verb formed, like many in the history of our language, by compressing a longer verbal phrase ‘to pick one’s brain’ into tighter form.

What a delectable new word! But not to the letter-writer who “could find it in no dictionary.” Awww. Maybe, if it gains wider usage, the dictionary will have to include the vivid brainpick in a future edition? Might that be the chief function of a dictionary? To describe how we currently use our language?

 

But has he a brain to pick? 17th-century trepanning instrument

 

A dictionary is not some immutable linguistic pattern-book against which all speech and writing must be measured. Unfortunately, that is how word cops use dictionaries, as a Procrustean bed. In Greek mythology Procrustes was a sadistic bandit who kidnapped travelers and made them fit into his special bed. If they were too tall, he cut off their feet. If they were too short, he stretched them on the iron rack that was his bed. Word cops like to do this to other people’s varying use of English.

But the word cops are wrong. English glories in variety. To paraphrase the Bible, in the house of language there are many Englishes. Only impaired Canadians are deaf to the glottal-stop delight of Cockney, the honey croon of Jamaican English, the flinty palaver of Newfoundland talk, the humorous practicality of Prairie phrases, the peculiar lilt of Ottawa Valley speech, the local words like skookum that sometimes brighten chat with a person from British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.

Word cops are snobs too. What their shrill complaints hide is their prejudice against all whom they perceive to be not of their class, and often not of their race. These elitist moaners huddle together in the warm certainty that they alone use correct English, and all the other, lower orders write and speak twaddle. One of my tests for Canadian word cops is to read their bitchy letters and see if I can imagine the writers of such missives throwing down their pens, turning off their e-mailing keyboards, leaving the ferny dells of Rosedale and going to volunteer at literacy programs in our northern Canadian neighbourhoods that teach basic reading and writing to the functionally illiterate. Ha! I won’t be betting a beaver pelt on that happening.

 

Well, Is You?

Consider the title phrase of this essay: “Is you is or is you ain’t usin’ English?” Did you understand what it means? Yes. Is it grammatical? In spite of what word cops might answer, it is grammatical. A basic grammar may even be genetically inherited. We may be born with a neural “grid” that predisposes humans to think grammatically. “Is you is or is you ain’t” happens to be a dialectical use of the verb “to be” in certain interrogative instances. It may even bear the dread label: Ebonics. That is, it may be part of an Afro-American dialect.

Now, certainly, it is not the grammar of Standard English. But SE began as a dialect too, as the speech and writing of powerful, educated Londoners centuries ago. A complex, binding relationship exists between dialect and snobbery, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out at the turn of the century in his drama “Pygmalion,” later turned into the Broadway musical, “My Fair Lady.” Shaw had fun with the fact that even a Cockney flower girl could rise to the heights of British society if she did one small thing: switch her verbal codes from Cockney to those of the ruling British elite.

 

Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, Our Fair Lady, luxuriates in the sumptuous flamboyancy of a plumed Ascot chapeau atop a crocheted and bowed dress, designed by Sir Cecil Beaton for the Warner Bros. movie — one of the most splendid costumes in the history of film!

 

The lesson of “Pygmalion” is still valid. Use your natal dialect, but beware. If you or your children wish to advance into the ruling, professional elite, you will have to learn Standard English. If school does not make you a graduate literate in Standard English, you may well be doomed to flip burgers and push mops. A life will be lost, not only a life of earning, but also a life of learning. You must acquire Standard English in order to learn what the modern world most values: the ability to keep learning, because most knowledge worth having will be expressed in a formal standard variety of your native tongue. The average person is capable of, and usually does learn, at least two dialects: his home speech and his standard language.

 

I Have an Idiolect?

Oh Doctor, Can It be Surgically Removed?

I remember being made painfully aware of my own southern Ontario rural dialect on my first day of college. I promised to meet someone on Saturday night. But I said, according to her, “Sair-dee” night, using a rural Canadianism, quite common too in British dialects, wherein intervocalic /t/ is replaced first by a glottal stop and then sometimes the stop disappears completely in a glide as the two, now contiguous, vowels blend into each other. Nowadays I still occasionally say “Sair-dee,” but instead of blushing, I smile. That’s me and that’s my idiolect, my own private mixture of dialect and standard language.

Insulting a person’s dialect is snotty and often racist. On the other hand, a dialect speaker who wants to better his or her chances is foolish to remain ignorant of Standard English. All social, ethnic, and regional dialects of English have their validity. I draw the line at schools that preach total freedom: no spelling, no grammar, no reading — just let the pupils speak in whatever dialect they brought to school in the first place. But, even that is permissible, as long as the teacher points out to pupils and parents that this refusal to master SE will handicap their children. In Paradigms Lost, critic John Simon wrote: “Everyone has a right to his ignorance and no one is compelled to become educated. But everyone is then also entitled to suffer the consequences of choosing not to become educated.”

Dialects suffer many prejudices. Dialects are branded as rural, old-fashioned, substandard, corrupted, and ignorant. They are not. But they won’t help you get a job at IBM.

Of course, human nature being what it is — in my opinion, an urge to power — users of dialect can also be crafty in exploiting the guilt of speakers of Standard English. I once attended a public lecture at Convocation Hall on the central campus of the University of Toronto in order to hear a famous British writer talk about her work. A few minutes into her fascinating talk, a member of the audience rose to interrupt her with these exact words: “You oppressin’ me by using big words I don’t know.” The writer looked down from her podium with a friendly smile and replied: “The solution to your problem is the use of a book called a dictionary.” I applauded and then stopped, worried lest I be branded a racist.

But then I began to applaud again. Wow, I better look around this essay. It is clear why I call this an essay, isn’t it? Essay is the apt word. But what if you had never heard or seen the word? Perhaps I’m oppressin’ some reader? An essay is au fond a trial specimen of one’s thought, an attempt at setting down a few modest reflections, a try only. The word stems from Old French assai, originally the testing, the assay, of a metal for its content. Borrowed from French into Middle English in the fifteenth century, the word entered French from Latin exagium ‘a weighing’ but in the earliest French applied to examining gold or silver or testing anything else.

Language is rules. But language is also play, and from playful use of language arise neologies. Dialect is a lush seed-bed of new words, from which the standard language often plucks fresh terms to invigorate its vocabulary. I coined a clumsy neology once: “deficitcation,” an act of excretion on an entire country and way of life in order to rid that country of a deficit. It won’t last.

 

Earthrise seen from the lunain

 

O Regrettable Discontinuance!

But neither did “lunain” survive, a new word coined in 1971 when humans landed on the moon. Lunain was the lunar surface, as terrain is the earthly one. I though it a lovely word for the cold, star-lit countenance of the moon. But no one else did. And so it wisped away and died, in obsolescent desuetude. The word cops among us would banish all such playfulness and variety from English. To thwart them, I shall remain a word nut.

Although grim rule-keepers armed with wordcrackers pound at the twin gates of linguistic novelty and diversity, let us keep them in their place, forever outside, envious rigid noses pressed to the bars of the gates, while inside the noisy dance of living words frolics us, the neological boogie-woogie rocks on, until day lights and shadows flee away.

The fifteenth-century Dutch humanist Erasmus first wrote: in regione caecorum rex est luscus ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’

My admonitory revision? In the land of the literate, the one-worded man is slave.

 

Copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

Order online for 3-Day Delivery in Canada

Order from Chapters/Indigo