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By NEIL POSTMAN

Words: demeaning of meaning

Essay

This is one of Illinois Issues' occasional essays.

When I was a boy attending elementary school in Brooklyn, New York, our teachers were deeply imbued with the idea of language correctness. This included pronouncing words correctly, enunciating them clearly and, most important, observing at all times grammatical propriety. My classmates and I did not find these things easy to learn since Brooklyn is quite far from Nebraska, where everyone spoke, from birth, the kind of English we had to struggle to achieve. Later on, I learned that the children of Nebraska had their own language burdens to bear, as they were being taught to speak English like the folks in Oregon or San Francisco or Phoenix. In any case, like the folks from somewhere else. Some of my Brooklyn classmates never learned the correct forms and some of us did, although sometimes through curious means. For example, I did outstanding work on all correct usage tests by the cunning strategy of finding the locution that sounded most comfortable, and then choosing the other one. I believe this is called reverse English.


For whenever language is enlisted into the service of a constricted and dogmatic moral agenda, it must sacrifice some of its history, beauty, versatility and functional variety

In any case, time passed and the pedagogical obsession with correctness seemed to lose much of its force and all of its point by the early 1950s, about the time I was training to be a high school English teacher. A group of scholars calling themselves descriptive linguists was able to show convincingly that "correctness" had nothing to do with logic or even clarity, still less history, but had everything to do with social power. Correctness, they preached, was a cruel, somewhat arbitrary, elitist conception imposed on the children of Brooklyn and Nebraska whose native dialects were as rich and useful in their way as any other form of speech.

My old teachers, as you would expect, didn't see it that way. To most of them, correct English was largely a moral issue. They would have readily conceded that their efforts were elitist, but they did not see this as a problem. You see, these teachers believed in hierarchies — hierarchies in literature, in food, in dress, in manners, and, inevitably, in speech and writing. The more sophisticated among them would also have conceded that there is a measure of arbitrariness in any configuration of standards, but they did not see this as a problem, either. The standards, after all, were there, irrespective of how they came to be, and our teachers saw it as their moral duty to celebrate those standards and to teach their students to respect them. These teachers were, in other words, decidedly not relativists; in fact, they were quite dogmatic. And at times oppressively so. This sometimes led them into saying and believing foolish things. I remember with a pleasure that still warms my heart when a fifth grade classmate, named Alvin Kaufman, took exception to being corrected by Mrs. Soybel about his use of a double negative in the sentence, "I don't have no money." Mrs. Soybel said that this was not only forbidden but also misleading since two negatives made a positive so that Alvin really meant that he had some money. Well, the rest of the class knew right there that Mrs. Soybel had got off the track somehow because no sensible person, from Brooklyn or anywhere else, could believe that that is what Alvin meant. But we didn't point this out because most of us liked Mrs. Soybel and didn't want to embarrass her. But Alvin didn't see it this way. So he asked her if it would be correct to say, "No, I don't have no money," since that had three negatives, and wouldn't that make the sentence negative again? Alvin, you see, was an excellent mathematics student. Mrs. Soybel told Alvin he was being fresh, which he was, and that you couldn't get very far in life with that sort of attitude, which was definitely wrong since Alvin later went into real estate and, by the age of 27, made his first million. Since then,

24/January 1992/Illinois Issues


he's had no occasion to say, "I don't have no money."

Of course, the Mrs. Soybels are largely gone now. As time passed, they were replaced, at least for a while, by teachers whose only standard was effectiveness. They certainly seemed opposed to promoting effete standards of rhetorical elegance. The only question they encouraged students to consider was, did your language do for you what you wished it to do? These teachers were not so much relativists as instrumentalists. To them, language is a tool with which one acts on the world. And that is all it is, let us say, like a screwdriver or a wind mill. It is a good tool when used to achieve one's purposes; a bad tool when it works against one's purposes. There is, of course, much to say in favor of this point of view, and some things to say against it; for example, it is largely indifferent to the idea that there is beauty in language or indeed that there is ugliness. And it does not take a position on the possibility that there are purposes that ought not to be pursued. One might say this point of view removed morality from language altogether. But it is pointless to discuss this matter since we have already entered a new phase.

It appears that Mrs. Soybel has come back. This time, along with Ms. Soybel, Mr. Soybel and just about everybody else who has anything to do with schools at any level. The new Soybels are moralists, like the old Soybels but with a different moral agenda. The old ones believed that their strictures and prescriptions would produce people of refinement, taste and exactitude. They believed that people who said, "I don't have no money," not only will never have it, but are doomed to limited and crass modes of expression and, therefore, to limited and crass perceptions of experience. The new Soybels believe that their strictures and prescriptions will produce people of an egalitarian, liberal and humane spirit. They believe that people who say "Chairman" instead of "Chair," "mankind" instead of "humankind," "black" instead of "African American" or "Oriental" instead of "Asian" will be plagued forever by the sins of sexism and racism. Like old Mrs. Soybel, these people are tough and exacting prescriptionists who do not take kindly to language diversity or, for the matter, independence.

Now, at a rough estimate, I would say that there is just about as much truth in what the new Soybels believe as in what the old ones believed. Each set of beliefs is rooted in a theory about the relationship of language to behavior; namely, that language-forms, when they become habitual, can make a difference in how we think and feel. I rather like this theory myself and have written four books based on it. But, of course, the theory has many facts to contradict it. It is obviously quite possible for one to have mastered Standard Edited English and yet be a sloppy thinker and a vulgarian at heart. It is also possible for one to use the currently approved forms of address and retain fairly primitive attitudes of sexism and racism. The opposite is also the case. I know more than a few people who slur and mispronounce their words and whose sentences feature egregious grammatical errors but who nonetheless see the world whole, precisely and generously. By the same token I know people who are fair, egalitarian and liberal of spirit but who call things by their more traditional designations and show no signs of conforming to current requirements. In other words, both the old and the new prescriptionists vastly overrate the capacity of language to control the passions of the heart and the directions of the mind. That is probably because these people don't know very much about language and haven't given the matter the attention it deserves. In any case, whenever one overrates a theory, there is the clear danger of dogmatism. Language dogmatists come to believe and say foolish things about meaning, about mind, about behavior and about the relationship among them. What is worse, they get other people to believe and say foolish things. And thus they demean themselves, their students and even language itself. For whenever language is enlisted into the service of a constricted and dogmatic moral agenda, it must sacrifice some of its history, beauty, versatility and functional variety. At least for a while. As it happens, language is wickedly resistant to dogmas about it. Even old Samuel Johnson who hoped his great 18th century dictionary would tidy up, mend, make more precise and then stabilize our language had, in the end, to acknowledge his efforts as futile. Language has its own history and internal logic; its hidden and magical meanings. Language has its reasons that reason knows not of, put there over the course of a millennium by millions whom we do not know but who surely included beggars and kings, slaves and masters, democrats and tyrants. Language was there before the dogmatists came and must ready itself for use after they are gone.


Language has its reasons that reason knows not of, put there over the course of a millennium by millions whom we do not know ...

This does not mean that language doesn't change. And it does not mean that language is always indifferent to our own moral or political agendas. What I am trying to say is that language uses us as much as we use it. In fact, much more so than some of us are inclined to think. Mrs. Soybel, who died 10 years ago, would be very surprised at what has happened to her beloved "whom" as in "Whom did you see?" and the nominative case, as in "That is he." I think, however, she would have accepted their demise with good grace. As for our modem-day prescriptionists, they, too, will have some surprises in store. It may well be that 30 years from now an African American will still be a black; a fire fighter, a fireman; and an Asian, an Oriental. There may even be students who will pass correct usage tests with some old-fashioned reverse English. Were that to be the case, perhaps the new Mrs. Soybels will conclude, at last, that language has a much richer agenda than was dreamt of in their philosophy.

Professor Neil Postman is chair of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University and the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969), The Politics of Reading: Point-Counterpoint (1973), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) and Conscientious Objections (1988).

January 1992/Illinois Issues/25


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