Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to the English Language. Oliver Kamm, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, RRP £9.99
Tim Harford, presenter of the Radio 4 programme More or Less, used the word “decimated” on-air a few weeks ago. He meant it in the sense of “destroyed in large part”. He sensed what was coming next, and it did: letters from listeners accusing him of illiteracy for not understanding that “decimate” means (so they claimed) “reduce by a tenth”. So Tim got me on the programme the next week to defend him, which I did.
The Latin root of “decimate” no more determines the word’s meaning than it does in the word December – which not even the most hardened pedant insists must mean the tenth month of the year. If you want to use “decimate” in its wider sense, go ahead: the great dictionaries and historical usage will back you up. It’s an error (linguists call it the etymological fallacy) to suppose that words have fixed and immutable meanings independent of the way speakers of the language use them.
Language is fascinating. It’s a distinctly human faculty that allows ideas and discoveries to be communicated across societies and ages without having to be created anew. Every society has language in immense grammatical complexity. Children become masters of complex grammatical constructions by the age of 3. Discoveries in linguistics and cognitive science are illuminating how we process the word. Yet almost daily you’ll find in the communications media some lament about declining standards and how young people are unable to construct grammatical sentences.
Those jeremiads are all wrong. The problem is that the doomsters and sticklers – broadcasters and writers like John Humphrys, Simon Heffer and Lynne Truss – mistake a particular dialect of English as somehow correct, whereas others are substandard. No linguist would agree with them. It’s essential that children (and adults) know the conventions of standard English, because that’s the form of the language that’s most widely recognised and it has social cachet. That doesn’t make it a more expressive, or logical, or complex form of the language. It’s just useful.
I write a weekly language column for The Times in which I try to dispel some of the myths about usage. Oddly, what fascinates the pedantic imagination is not what we can achieve with language but what we can proscribe. The things that sticklers worry about – “decimate” in its looser sense; “disinterested” to mean bored rather than impartial; “none” as a plural; “they” as a gender-neutral singular; and many others – have nothing to do with grammar in the sense that linguists understand the term. They’re trivial complaints, at best; more usually, they are factually wrong assertions about the grammar and history of the English language. English is not a fixed body of rules. It does have many rules (which linguists work out by examining the regularities of how English speakers use their own language) and it’s possible for you, me or my newspaper to make mistakes of syntax, semantics, spelling and punctuation. But it isn’t possible for everyone, or for a substantial body of expert users of the language, to be wrong on the same linguistic point at the same time. If it’s widely used, it’s part of the language.
All of what I’ve said would be, and is, denounced by commentators who believe that defending linguistic standards, as they define them, is crucial to social order or even civilisation. (I’m not parodying them, either; this is genuinely argued by conservative commentators like my Times colleague Melanie Phillips or the eccentric autodidact Nevile Gwynne.) Yet the argument is absolutely standard to scholarly linguists. I know of no discipline where the gap between popular commentary and science is so vast. My advice, in understanding how linguists reason, is to consider how the next small child you pass in the street expresses complex ideas in speech. A sentence like “I want an ice-cream” follows strict grammatical rules of syntax, number and tense.
From the linguistic mastery of every small child, many scholars have argued that language is the realisation of an innate human faculty rather than an acquired cultural trait. The most prominent name associated with this view is Noam Chomsky. He is most famous for voluminous writings denouncing the foreign policy of the United States, and these are sadly devoid of merit and show a flagrant disregard for scholarly procedure. But the fact remains that Chomsky is not only a notable but a great scientist whose understanding of language has revolutionised the field. And if, as many (though not all) linguists and cognitive scientists argue, humans have an instinct to acquire a set of grammatical rules, the notion that society is constantly at risk from barbarian indifference to “correct usage” becomes pretty laughable.
Contrary to the laments of critics of modern education (who rarely go and talk to schools, as I do), language teaching has had a renaissance in the past generation, Children are taught English language well and standards of literary have never been higher. I’m delighted by this and believe it will continue provided we can dispense with two hardy but destructive superstitions. First, non-standard dialects of the language are not “wrong; they are other ways of realising the language instinct, and shouldn’t be castigated as substandard. Second, teaching children to use language well is different from teaching them a range of superstitions (“don’t split infinitives”, “don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction” and so on) that have long been debunked and just aren’t true.
The grammar sticklers claim to stand for tradition and standards but they’re mistaken. Theirs is not a pure form of English, for no such thing has ever existed. Their critique is not about language but class. Robert Baker, one of the original style gurus, deplored – in 1770 – the speech of actors and “low people”. Little has changed. The purists stand not for standards but for reaction and ignorance. Simon Heffer, my longstanding sparring partner in the grammar wars, specifically lambasts scholarly linguists – people who treat language as a matter for inquiry rather than edict. Nevile Gwynne literally argues that the Sun goes round the Earth and that the Church was right to condemn Galileo. I’ve had enough.
