18 December 2010
Aack! Another vector for “the English language is going to hell.” And this time from a publisher that should know better.
I’m not familiar with Duane Roller. His credentials make him out to be a respected historian of the classical period. And while I would hesitate to question him on the subject of Cleopatra, he does not appear to have any particular expertise in linguistics or modern language studies, and his blog post pretty much confirms he has no clue about the subject.
I’m not disputing Roller’s praise of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which was once a superb reference. Although like all such references, the 1926 edition has outlived its utility and should be allowed to pass away with dignity. The more recent third edition, while a serviceable style manual, isn’t the best on the market.
But Roller proceeds from the assumption that there is one, single “proper” way to write in English, and his claims that the English language is going to the dogs are claptrap and completely unsubstantiated by any evidence (and how do you even measure something like this?). I’m sorry, a cite of the opinion of a Washington Post columnist doesn’t count as evidence. (Would Dr. Roller accept Mr. Weingarten’s opinion as fact if the subject were Antony and Cleopatra? I think not.) Jonathan Swift was making the same argument about the language going to the dogs three hundred years ago. People bemoaned the fact that the printing press made everyone an author, and there were probably those who despaired because poets like Chaucer were writing in the vulgar tongue of English instead of proper French.
It may be true that newspapers today have more spelling and grammatical errors than a decade or two ago. (That’s probably something you could quantify and track, although I don’t know anyone who has done so systematically.) But if so, it is more likely the result of having fired all their copy editors rather than because reporters are less skilled at writing than in days past. And never mind the fact that what most people consider “bad grammar” is actually nothing of the kind.
Dr. Roller has many more years of grading student papers than I, but in the few months that I’ve been doing it I have been surprised at how few grammatical and spelling mistakes the students make (even on in-class assignments without the benefit of electronic spell checkers). With few exceptions, mostly from English-as-a-second-language students, the papers consist of grammatically correct sentences. Where the students seem to have problems are in 1) structuring arguments, 2) insufficient academic vocabulary, and 3) inexperience in writing in a formal, academic register. A style manual like Fowler’s will not help with any of these. The solution is to give the students more practice in academic reading and writing. I do have many years of experience as a professional copy editor, and I my experience has shown that those in the business world, not professional writers, are grammatically skilled as well. Their sins are usually use of jargon in pieces intended for general audiences and verbosity.
And of course, what diatribe about bad English would not be complete without laying the blame on the “internet”? No more need be said on this. Dr. Roller has the standard write-a-blog-post-bitching-about-English-usage playbook and he’s running through it.
The line that most intrigues me is, “Astonishingly, one of our most distinguished literary magazines questioned something that I said because it could not be verified on the internet.” Now, I don’t know what the back story is here. I suspect that his reference was not available online and the editors were having trouble finding it, but it comes across as if Dr. Roller is in a huff because someone dared fact-check his work. Perhaps Dr. Roller should be less concerned with grammar mistakes of others and more concerned with what he is actually writing himself. In the words of the immortal Inigo Montoya, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
