What, me worry?
English isn't getting any dumber
DID SOMEONE JUST die and make me head of the English Protection Society, chief doctor on the language ward, Wonder Woman of words? For some reason, my inbox is suddenly bulging with demands and pleas for me to use my superpowers wisely.
"Don't give up the fight against dumbing down the language," urges one reader. "Stop trying to justify this modern wave of (mis)-usage by citing some obscure 18th-century reference," says another. "Please don't add to the dumbing down of our society by saying we'll all just get used to it," echoes a third.
Who, me? I'm not fighting, and I'm not justifying; in the cases that provoked these comments, I was looking at the evolution of so fun, the logic behind one of the only, and the possible reasons for a confusion between cue and queue. Interesting stories all, I thought, and unlikely to dummify anyone.
I'm skeptical, anyway, about this whole "dumbing down" idea. That phrase begs the question, in the old sense traditionalists cling to: It assumes what needs to be proved. Who says "the language" is dumber than it used to be? When was it smart? Where's the evidence?
Even if I bought the declinist theory, I don't think a column made up of gripes, whines, and dope slaps would help matters; the people who read such things are already believers. Beyond that, though, there are fatal flaws in the whack-a-solecism approach to language improvement.
One is that no two critics have the same list of language sins. If you put identical twins side by side on a newspaper copy desk, they'd soon come to blows over commas or split infinitives. One editor's pet peeve, as all journalists know, is another's cheery colloquialism.
This lack of consensus is no surprise: Behind many usage "rules" you'll find only a little guy behind a curtain, blowing smoke. John Dryden, for instance: Anxiously comparing his work to Shakespeare's and Ben Jonson's, he noted that ending sentences with prepositions was "a common fault" with Jonson. More than three centuries later, there are still people who think we shouldn't end sentences with prepositions - all because of Dryden's insecure nitpicking.
The other problem with the error-correcting approach is that it puts the emphasis on small (and often trivial) usage points. But unpolished prose is not like a leaky roof that needs a bit of patching; you can fix every usage goof in a draft and still have hours of reworking ahead. Avoiding errors is a good thing, but it's not what makes writing good.
I suppose I should affirm that yes, I like and (mostly) use standard English. I have taught it to college students and worked within it for decades as an editor. But as John McIntyre wrote recently on his editing blog, You Don't Say, copy editors aren't the world's language police; they just enforce the local workplace dialect. "I may cringe at the way bureaucrats talk, or swear at the writing in the instructions for U.S. Form 1040 . . . but those are all matters of personal taste and preference," he says. "Not my job."
Like McIntyre, I cringe now and then; I don't like bicep and criteria used as singulars, or faux-Elizabethan verbs (they runneth over), or bruschetta's American pronunciation. But I think so fun is fine, and though I can't use hopefully as a sentence adverb, I don't mind if you do.
Aha, says another reader: Doesn't that mean you tolerate behavior you wouldn't yourself indulge in? You bet it does. There are lots of things I prefer to avoid - raw fish, platform shoes, horror movies, Hummers - but that doesn't mean I disapprove of them. (Well, maybe the Hummers.)
In fact, word lovers might be happier if we agreed to think of verbal variations as fashion experiments, not heresies or assaults or barbarisms. I could care less and bored of really shouldn't affect your quality of life, any more than other people's low-slung jeans or visible bra straps do.
Besides, repeating the same old language peeves - and I have repeated my share - eventually gets boring for everyone. It's much more fun to investigate what's going on: Is the usage really new, or just new to you? Is it a British import, surfer slang, business jargon? What accounts for its appeal? The answers aren't always available, but the search is guaranteed to be more thrilling than your 700th declaration that you really, really hate gone missing.
And after all, there are only two possible fates for any new usage. Either it will fade away, in which case your fulminations are unnecessary, or it will stick around, meaning they are useless. You, the individual, may or may not "get used to it," depending on its ubiquity and your resistance. But your grandchildren will - for sure.
E-mail Jan Freeman at freeman@globe.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas.
rising
falling 