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phillipmccavety

Joined: 04 Jun 2004
Posts: 91
Location: China

Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2004 9:59 pm Post subject: Posted without comment.

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Spelling and grammar are not just for fuddy-duddies, writes Lynne Truss.

More miserable news about language, then. More reason to pop off to the nearest wall and bang our heads against it. According to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, half the people using it these days are stumped by the difference between "reign" and "rein", and "pouring" and "poring".

However, before we start to share our cyanide capsules, perhaps we should pause. I, for one, am heartened to hear that people are looking things up in dictionaries at all. Over the past few months, I have been told repeatedly that "everyone" now relies on computer spell-checker programs, just as they rely on grammar checkers for their punctuation.

Whenever I have pointed out that spell-checkers are inferior to dictionaries because, when you look up a word in a dictionary, you get a definition as well, I have met with pitying looks. Yet evidently - hooray! - there are still a few people willing to drag that heavy tome off the shelf and discover that "pour" may sound very much like "pore", but is actually a completely different word.

Does it matter that people spell correctly? Well, the pour/pore example is a pretty good place to start. Write, "I have been pouring over my books" and you will find it leads to tricky extra questions, such as, "Pouring what?" Yet there is an idea steadily gathering force that communication should be judged only by functional effectiveness and that, if you "get the gist" of what someone is saying, this is enough. It seems that notions of "correct" English are for fuddy-duddies who take nasty pleasure in other people's mistakes.

I am not persuaded by this argument. In fact, it makes me weep and thunder by turns. "Please don't use the expression 'Get the gist'!" I pray, whenever I have to engage in debate with the latest person advocating the liberating joy of a grammatical free-for-all.

Is conveying a gist the highest aim of language? Correct me if I'm wrong, but cavemen pointing and grunting got the bloody gist!But they always do. "Ah, but does it matter, so long as we get the gist?" they ask, as if saying something original and profound. "Is conveying a gist the highest aim of language?" I ask (sometimes a bit emotionally). "Correct me if I'm wrong, but cavemen pointing and grunting got the bloody gist!"

The other idea gathering force is that the written word is a mere adjunct to speech - which is a rather serious development for those of us who were brought up to worship books, and instinctively regard the hierarchy as the other way round. Yet it's an unignorable fact: when emailing and texting, people use a hybrid form of language that is half-talking, half-writing. Hence the decline of punctuation; hence all this annoying "gist" talk; and hence the universal cavalier disregard for spelling. There is a huge irony here, sadly. Thanks to a miraculous new technology, more people are writing more stuff than ever before. Yet, through a combination of bad education and misguided egalitarianism, the lower the standard of written communication, the better it is perceived to be.

A lot of nonsense is talked about "proper" English being a means of endorsing the existing social status quo. My feeling is that the opposite is true. If you encourage people to write the way they talk, social divisions are ultimately reinforced, even exacerbated. I'm a working-class English girl who read a lot of books and grew up to - well, to write this piece in a major broadsheet newspaper anyway, so maybe I have an old-fashioned view of education as the instrument of social mobility. But it's pretty clear to anyone that, if children are taught that "getting the gist" is sufficient, everyone stays where they are.

Last weekend, the American comedian Bill Cosby sent a very blunt message to the patois-speakers of the black community in the United States, to the same effect. "Civil rights campaigners marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads who can't speak English . . . Everybody knows it's important to speak English . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."

Doesn't it drive you nuts, all this? The argument goes that the spelling of English words is, by and large, "irrational". Why is there a silent "p" in "receipt" and not in "deceit"? Well, the quick answer is: life's a pain sometimes; stop whining; if you don't like it, go and speak German. In any case, if you try to reform the spelling of English along "rational" lines, you discover quite quickly that there is no way of doing it.

It seems to me that people just resent having to learn things. "How do you explain to an eight-year-old that the word 'yacht' has all these strange letters in it?" a chap once asked me on a television chat show. This seemed an unanswerable question at the time. It was only afterwards that I worked out my objection to it. Why should the comprehension level of an eight-year-old be our standard for anything?

Personally, I have spelling blind spots, just as I have grammar blind spots - and when they are pointed out to me, I am mortified. That's the way it ought to be, I reckon. On the other hand, however, I am not ashamed at all of thinking that the conventions of the written word (spelling, grammar, punctuation) need to be protected against the barbarians.

Yesterday, as I was travelling by car, the driver offered to stop at a newsagent, but as he slowed, I said: "No, look, it says 'stationary' with an 'a'; we'll go somewhere else." He laughed politely, but I wasn't joking.

Perhaps the answer is to carry a stack of Concise Oxford English Dictionaries, and deliver them personally, to show shopkeepers that "stationery" has an 'e'. Or, if feelings are running particularly high, tie a Concise OED to a brick and heave it through the window. Either way, one mournfully suspects, they still might not get the gist.

British author and broadcaster Lynne Truss is the author of the bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves. This article first appeared in The Daily Telegraph, London

Scott in HK

Joined: 11 Jan 2003
Posts: 148

Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 2:13 am Post subject:

Interesting enough, I just finished an article in the New Yorker that points out all the grammar errors in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The author of the article, whose name escapes me, went to great lengths to show that Lynne doesn't really have a good grasp of subject matter that she defends so often in print.

Ailian

Joined: 15 Apr 2004
Posts: 192
Location: PRC!

Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 3:34 am Post subject:

That author was Louis Menand. His article, "Bad Comma", is available online here.

migo

Joined: 04 Jul 2004
Posts: 201

Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 3:35 am Post subject:

Hmm, she didn't have the best grammar herself.

zaneth

Joined: 31 Mar 2004
Posts: 545
Location: Between Russia and Germany

Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 8:26 am Post subject:

Does the OED really need the help of a brick to be dangerous to windows?

migo

Joined: 04 Jul 2004
Posts: 201

Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 12:30 am Post subject:

Probably not.

Stephen Jones

Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124

Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:35 am Post subject:

A lot of the 'rules' Menand talks about are simply American prejudices.

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