Trophy boyfriend and I had an argument this last weekend, and it was one of those really satisfying arguments where you know exactly what you are arguing about, there are no actual emotions involved, and you are thus able to bring the whole thing to a prompt and satisfactory conclusion... not. It started with my irritation at his overuse of the word 'whimsical,' or to be fair, my perception of his overuse of the word, and spiralled from there into the murky depths of overgeneralized and slightly hysterical accusations of what, exactly, I couldn't say, but it wasn't comfortable and the resolution will only come, I suspect, when we both decide to just forget about it and go back to whatever it is we usually talk about.
But the whole episode has got me thinking about language, and English in particular, and trying to puzzle out why the vagaries of language are so acutely personal. Is it just tribalism in disguise? An attempt by Strunk & White (and me! me too!) to lord it over the unlettered unwashed masses so we can temporarily feel better about ourselves while we contemplate the dark void that awaits us after we die? Do I disdain the incorrect (or "incorrect") use of a adjective where an adverb should go because I like the dopamine rush of educated superiority? Is it elitism? (The rise of Donald Trump depends on trashing elitism, so clearly elitism isn't all bad, but...)
Full disclosure: I was inoculated at a deeply impressionable age (thirteen) by a living caricature of a women's college bluestocking who taught me (joy!) how to diagram a sentence, why it is logical for gerunds when used as nouns to go with possessive pronouns, and the various uses of a semicolon, and (surprise!) I ate that shit UP. (We also read our way through the high points of the old-white-mostly male English-language canon: Chaucer to... I think Katherine Mansfield was probably about as modern as she could stand to teach. Obviously incomplete, but she only had us for a year, and given the students she had to cope with, an ambitious start.)
So anyway. Fast forward to a few years later, when the following questions appeared on a marine biology seminar final exam:
Q. What is the correct plural of the word 'genus'?
Q. What is the correct singular of the word 'algae'?
There was some wailing from all the other students about how the question had nothing to do with marine biology knowledge, and wasn't fair, etc., and of course, little Hermione Granger that I am, I wrote 'genera' and 'alga' in my neatest, smuggest handwriting and thought how great it was that the professor gave a shit about things I knew and other people didn't, then spent several years feeling embarrassed about what a little prissy brat I was, and now I'm more grownup and everything's gone all shades of grey on me. I can see and agree with (you will all be relieved to know) the other students: they're right. The question wasn't about marine biology. And there are way more important things to worry about. But which word _do_ you use? Are you a data/datum person? or do you even know that this is a thing?
Specifically on the subject of Latin plurals, there is plenty of vitriol and ridicule being hurled across both sides of the line, (making the 'who cares, move on' point of view seem much the most attractive), but really we all know who's going to end up winning the argument. Both sides are of course perfectly right: the winning side, the side with way more people on it, would say that Latin plurals are outdated, elitist, ridiculous, inefficient, and make it harder to learn English for non-native speakers (viz the late, great Tom Lehrer making fun of Harvard football teams playing at various 'stadia' rather than 'stadiums'). And the losing side protests, but but but, Latin plurals can be elegant, precise, a reminder of the etymology of a word, and it's weird and wonderful and beautiful to have different ways of making a plural depending on which strand of English the word came from.
I think for me ultimately this is the argument that pushes me over the line into the arms of the heroically stupid defenders of a static language. To use the word 'genera' rather than 'genuses' is not just to adhere to an outdated silly rule just to prove you know more than the people who don't (although yes, it can be that as well). It's lighting a candle on a Day of the Dead altar: on the highest shelf is a picture of a Roman centurion, far from his Mediterranean home, shivering in the bloody awful weather in some fort along Hadrian's wall in the second century; lower down, here is a group shot of English schoolboys swotting away at their Latin prep before they grew up to be (bottom shelf) the mustachio'ed Victorian gentleman scientists responsible for the propagation of the taxonomic nomenclature, all because, wow, how crazy is that, that there were all these proto-Italians running around in England at the beginning of written history.
Likewise, I was given a gag gift for my birthday recently - a pair of socks inscribed with the motto, "Thou hath balls," with a frankly awesome picture of a guy arm-wrestling a medieval lion - and, yup, it's deeply, deeply obnoxious to point out that it should be, 'thou hast,' not 'thou hath,' and again, really who cares anyway. But getting it right is also a way of saying, hey, Shakespeare and whoever you were who wrote the King James Bible, and all you other Tudor-through-Stuart bookish types: thank you. That was a lot of gorgeous rich fantastic stuff you gave us. We still read it and remember it with at least a tiny bit of accuracy. What's more important, to just say thank you to my friend for the socks? or to say thank you to Shakespeare for the language? I don't know. I want a graceful way to do both, and if the sockmakers had just run 'thou hath' through their Renaissance grammar checker (Google: get on that, please) and put 'thou hast' instead, I could have saved myself a paragraph's worth of angst over how much of my own small-mindedness I'm willing to reveal in a public blog.
There are a lot of things that the English took in their nearly successful attempt at world domination that were not right, not fair, not OK, and which have contributed to a lot of people in the developing world living in dire circumstances, but language - you can take it and still leave it with its owners! How terrific is that? No guilt or apology required! English is both omnivorous and voracious, and as a result we famously clock over half a million words, compared to 100-200k per Romance language. (A quick internet search just told me that Arabic, meanwhile, has got over 12 million words, which is amazing and makes me want to try and learn Arabic immediately right now so I can find out what can they say that we can't). I am sure speakers of Swedish, Inuit, Tagalog, etc. would say the same about their languages, blah blah blah, but I feel a patriotism about the English language that I have never felt about an actual country. English is sprawling, agile, muscular, magical, volatile, dirty, soaring, miraculous. English is fucking great.
Here is the writer A. A. Gill talking to a group of schoolkids, and I suspect him of secretly being on the fence himself with regards to language use: in grammatical, correctly punctuated, eloquent sentences packed with SAT words, he makes the case for everyone being allowed to do whatever they want with English.
"I told them this was their language, this English, this most marvellous and expressive cloak of meaning and imagination. This great, exclamatory, illuminating song, it belonged to anyone who found it in their mouths. There was no wrong way to say it, or write it, the language couldn’t be compelled or herded, it couldn’t be tonsured or pruned, pollarded or plaited, it was as hard as oaths and as subtle as rhyme. It couldn’t be forced or bullied or policed by academics; it wasn’t owned by those with flat accents; nobody had the right to tell them how to use it or what to say. There are no rules and nobody speaks incorrectly, because there is no correctly: no high court of syntax. And while everyone can speak with the language, nobody speaks for the language. Not grammars, not dictionaries. They just run along behind, picking up discarded usages. This English doesn’t belong to examiners or teachers. All of you already own the greatest gift, the highest degree this country can bestow. It’s on the tip of your tongue."
His point is terrific, and salient, and... would not come across nearly so well were he speaking less articulately. So here's what I think my own philosophy towards language is going to be: Add words. Find new meanings. Build new and more colourful phrases. Be flexible. Allow language to grow. But also: know and use lots of words, honour old words, understand how the different parts of language work, and let's encourage our kids to do the same. It's not elitism, it's gratitude for the astonishing wealth we have inherited.
