The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (65 page)

I must also say something in defense of the college students, welfare applicants, and Joe Sixpacks whose language is so often held up to ridicule by the entertainers. Cartoonists and dialogue writers know that you can make anyone look like a bumpkin by rendering his speech quasi-phoneticalty instead of with conventional spelling (“sez,” “cum,” “wimmin,” “hafta,” “crooshul,” and so on). Lederer occasionally resorts to this cheap trick in “Howta Reckanize American Slurivan,” which deplores unremarkable examples of English phonological processes like “coulda” and “could of”
(could have)
, “forced”
(forest)
, “granite”
(granted)
, “neck store”
(next door)
, and “then” (
than
). As we saw in Chapter 6, everyone but a science fiction robot slurs their speech (yes,
their
speech, dammit) in systematic ways.

Lederer also reproduces lists of “howlers” from student term papers, automobile insurance claim forms, and welfare applications, familiar to many people as faded mimeos tacked on the bulletin boards of university and government offices:

These lists are good for a few laughs, but there is something you should know before you conclude that the teeming masses are comically inept at writing. Most of the howlers are probably fabrications.

The folklorist Jan Brunvand has documented hundreds of “urban legends,” intriguing stories that everyone swears happened to a friend of a friend (“
FOAF
” is the technical term), and that circulate for years in nearly identical form in city after city, but that can never be documented as real events. The Hippie Baby Sitter, Alligators in the Sewers, the Kentucky Fried Rat, and Halloween Sadists (the ones who put razor blades in apples) are some of the more famous tales. The howlers, it turns out, are examples of a subgenre called xeroxlore. The employee who posts one of these lists admits that he did not compile the items himself but took them from a list someone gave him, which were taken from another list, which excerpted letters that someone in some office somewhere
really did receive
. Nearly identical lists have been circulating since World War I, and have been independently credited to offices in New England, Alabama, Salt Lake City, and so on. As Brunvand notes, the chances seem slim that the same amusing double entrendres are made in so many separate locations over so many years. The advent of electronic mail has quickened the creation and dissemination of these lists, and I receive one every now and again. But I smell intentional facetiousness (whether it is from the student or the professor is not clear), not accidentally hilarious incompetence, in howlers like “adamant: pertaining to original sin” and “gubernatorial: having to do with peanuts.”

The final kind of maven is the sage, typified by the late Theodore Bernstein, a
New York Times
editor and the author of the delightful handbook
The Careful Writer
, and William Safire. They are known for taking a moderate, common-sense approach to matters of usage, and they tease their victims with wit rather than savaging them with invective. I enjoy reading the sages, and have nothing but awe for a pen like Safire’s that can summarize the content of an anti-pornography statute as “It isn’t the teat, it’s the tumidity.” But the sad fact is that even a sage like Safire, the closest thing we have to an enlightened language pundit, misjudges the linguistic sophistication of the common speaker and as a result misses the target in many of his commentaries. To prove this charge, I will walk you through a single column of his, from
The New York Times Magazine
of October 4, 1992.

The column had three stories, discussing six examples of questionable usage. The first story was a nonpartisan analysis of supposed pronoun case errors made by the two candidates in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. George Bush had recently adopted the slogan “Who do you trust?,” alienating schoolteachers across the nation who noted that
who
is a “subject pronoun” (nominative or subjective case) and the question is asking about the object of
trust
(accusative or objective case). One would say
You do trust him
, not
You do trust he
, and so the question word should be
whom
, not
who
.

This, of course, is one of the standard prescriptivist complaints about common speech. In reply, one might point out that the
who/whom
distinction is a relic of the English case system, abandoned by nouns centuries ago and found today only among pronouns in distinctions like
he/him
. Even among pronouns, the old distinction between subject
ye
and object
you
has vanished, leaving
you
to play both roles and
ye
as sounding completely archaic.
Whom
has outlived
ye
but is clearly moribund; it now sounds pretentious in most spoken contexts. No one demands of Bush that he say
Whom do ye trust?
If the langage can bear the loss of
ye
, using
you
for both subjects and objects, why insist on clinging to
whom
, when everyone uses
who
for both subjects and objects?

Safire, with his enlightened attitude toward usage, recognizes the problem and proposes

But Safire’s recommendation is Solomonic in the sense of being an unacceptable pseudo-compromise. Telling people to avoid a problematic construction sounds like common sense, but in the case of object questions with
who
, it demands an intolerable sacrifice. People ask questions about the objects of verbs and prepositions
a lot
. Here are just a few examples I culled from transcripts of conversations between parents and their children:

(Imagine replacing any of these with
whom!
) Safire’s advice is to change such questions to
Which person
or
Which child
. But the advice would have people violate the most important maxim of good prose: Omit needless words. It also would force them to overuse the word
which
, described by one stylist as “the ugliest word in the English language.” Finally, it subverts the supposed goal of rules of usage, which is to allow people to express their thoughts as clearly and precisely as possible. A question like
Who did we see on the way home?
can embrace one person, many people, or any combination or number of adults, babies, children, and familiar dogs. Any specific substitution like
Which person?
forecloses some of these possibilities, contrary to the question-asker’s intent. And how in the world would you apply Safire’s Law to the famous refrain

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Safire should have taken his observation about the pedantic sound of
whom
to its logical conclusion and advised the president that there is no reason to change the slogan, at least no grammatical reason.

Turning to the Democrats, Safire gets on Bill Clinton’s case, as he puts it, for asking voters to “give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back.” No one would say
give In break
, because the indirect object of
give
must have accusative case. So it should be
give Al Gore and me a chance
.

Probably no “grammatical error” has received as much scorn as “misuse” of pronoun case inside conjunctions (phrases containing two elements joined by
and
or
or
). What teenager has not been corrected for saying
Me and Jennifer are going to the mall?
A colleague of mine recalls that when she was twelve, her mother would not allow her to have her ears pierced until she stopped saying it. The standard story is that the accusative pronoun
me
does not belong in subject position—no one would say
Me is going to the mall
—so it should be
Jennifer and I
. People tend to misremember the advice as “When in doubt, ‘say so-and-so and I,’ not ‘so-and-so and me,’” so they unthinkingly overapply it—a process linguists call hypercorrection—resulting in “mistakes” like
Al Gore and I a chance
and the even more despised
between you and I
.

But if the person on the street is so good at avoiding
Me is going
and
Give I a break
, and if even Ivy League professors and former Rhodes Scholars can’t seem to avoid
Me and Jennifer are going
and
Give Al and I a chance
, might it not be the mavens that misunderstand English grammar, not the speakers? The mavens’ case about case rests on one assumption: if an entire conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical feature, too. But that is just false.

Jennifer
is singular; you say
Jennifer is
, not
Jennifer are
. The pronoun
She
is singular; you say
She is
, not
She are
. But the conjunction
She and Jennifer
is not singular, it’s plural; you say
She and Jennifer are
, not
She and Jennifer is
. So if a conjunction can have a different grammatical
number
from the pronouns inside it (She and Jennifer
are
), why must it have the same grammatical
case
as the pronouns inside it (Give Al Gore and
I
a chance)? The answer is that it need not. A conjunction is an example of a “headless’ construction. Recall that the head of a phrase is the word that stands for the whole phrase. In the phrase
the tall blond man with one black shoe
, the head is the word
man
, because the entire phrase gets its properties from
man
—the phrase refers to a kind of man, and is third person singular, because that’s what
man
is. But a conjunction has no head; it is not the same as any of its parts. If John and Marsha met, it does not mean that John met and that Marsha met. If voters give Clinton and Gore a chance, they are not giving Gore his own chance, added on to the chance they are giving Clinton; they are giving the entire ticket a chance. So just because
Me and Jennifer
is a subject that requires subject case, it does not mean that
Me
is a subject that requires subject case, and just because
Al Gore and I
is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that
I
is an object that requires object case. On grammatical grounds, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants. The linguist Joseph Emonds has analyzed the
Me and Jennifer/ Between you and I
phenomenon in great technical detail. He concludes that the language that the mavens want us to speak is not only not English, it is not a possible human language!

In the second story of his column, Safire replies to a diplomat who received a government warning about “crimes against tourists (primarily robberies, muggings, and pick-pocketings).” The diplomat writes,