English: It ain’t what it used to be
... AND THAT’S WHY IT ‘ATE THE WORLD’
Nob ody is safe from the scourge of t he English pedants: The grammar Nazis, the prescriptivists, the language police.
These are the people who demand that grocery stores correct the “five items or less” signs at the express lane. They light up Internet forums with all- night discussions about the use of “who” versus “whom.” They pen outraged emails to news media noting that it’s incorrect to write about somebody “penning” an email.
But these pedants are not only annoying, they’re usually wrong.
To explain why, here’s the first line from the 1,000- year- old epic poem Beowulf, “Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum.”
That bundle of accented gibberish is Old English, the distant ancestor of what is now the world’s secondmost spoken language.
And yet it’s so incomprehensible that even Old English scholars aren’t entirely sure what it means. The first word “hwaet!” was long thought to mean “listen!” — until British linguist George Walkden surmised in 2013 that it actually might mean “how.”
But the reason we can’t read Beowulf is the same reason high school students need a guide to read Shakespeare: English is constantly evolving.
“If speakers of a language can do something and they can do it repeatedly, and the rest of the community understands them, then we aren’t dealing with a ‘ grammatical’ error,” said Alexandra D’Arcy, director of the University of Victoria’s Sociolinguistics Research Lab. It’s the reason that so much of the English dictionary is filled with words whose meanings have changed sharply over the centuries.
“Silly” used to mean “happy” or“innocent .” “Meat” used to refer to any solid food.
Any novel that predates the First World War is likely to be littered with giggle-worthy non- sexualized references to “gay,” “queer” and “ejaculate.”
D’Arcy’s own favourite is “hussy.” The word that now means “a lewd or brazen woman” is derived from the Old English huswif, which carried the rather vanilla meaning of “housewife.”
And these changes continue every day.
A recent example is “humbled,” a word that not too long ago was synonymous with “humiliated.”
Instead, “humbled” is now most often used by politicians who have just won an election or scored a major endorsement.
A similar change is taking hold with “there’s.” The phrase “there’s some cats” is technically incorrect since the contraction of “there’s” refers to “there is” instead of “there are.”
But the widespread usage of the contraction in that context has virtually guaranteed that it will soon be standard English.
“The rules of Standard English are not legislated by a tribunal of lexicographers but emerge as an implicit consensus within a virtual community of writers, readers, and editors,” wrote the Canadian- born Harvard linguist Steven Pinker in his book The Sense of Style.
As an example, Pinker used the words “ain’t” and “i sn’ t.” Both words were equally “incorrect” slang terms when they were first used, but “i sn’ t ” became “correct” simply because it was the slang term used in the regions of London where written English was first standardized.
This kind of evolution happens in all spoken languages, but it’s particularly dramatic in English. With so much of the world’s culture and trade conducted in English, it changes at a much faster pace than, say, Welsh or Cree.
“It really is the language that ate the world, and it absorbs everything it touches,” said Gerard Van Herk at Memorial University’s Department of Linguistics.
T here are l i mits, of course.
As the British l i nguist Geoffrey Pullum told The Daily Telegraph i n 2014: “We grammarians who study the English language are not all bow- tie- wearing martinets, but we’re also not flaming liberals who think everything should be allowed.”
Pullum said there is a “sensible middle ground” where standard English is decided not by uptight grammarians, but based on close study of how the language is being used by its native speakers.
There are no “custodians of English,” in other words — just a chaotic mass of speakers who are constantly and subconsciously agreeing on general rules of how it should be understood.
“They think they ’re guardians of language ,” wrote the English comedian Stephen Fry in a 2008 essay against uptight pedantry. “They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.”
Fortunately, t here are homes for language cops.
They can speak French. Unlike open source English, French’s official usage and grammar is strictly governed by the Paris- based Académie française.
There, l ed by a small cadre known as the “immortals,” the academy shields French against unwanted outside influence.
The academy even has a blog called “Say, Do Not Say.”
Or, language pedants can join the Roman Catholic Church. While the world’s combined Catholic clergy proudly speak almost every language and dialect around the world, the official business of the Holy See is still done in Ecclesiastical Latin. Latin is static and doesn’t need to twist itself into new forms in order to cope with social change or technological innovation.
Remaining static is part of the point; it retains church writings in a form immune from the twists and turns of history. As one blogger put it, Latin “symbolizes our unchanging God superbly, because Latin does not change.”
So there you go, pedant: Your devotion to unchanging grammar and spelling can be a very good and holy thing — just not in English.
THEY’RE NO MORE GUARDIANS OF LANGUAGE THAN THE KENNEL CLUB IS THE GUARDIAN OF DOGKIND.