The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (68 page)

Once again, by patronizing Streisand’s language, Safire has misanalyzed both its form and its meaning. He has not noticed that: (1) The word
very
is not connected to the preposition in; it’s connected to the entire prepositional phrase
in the moment
. (2) Streisand is not using the intransitive
in
, with its special sense of “fashionable”; she is using the conventional transitive in with a noun phrase object,
the moment
. (3) Her use of a prepositional phrase as if it was an adjective to describe some mental or emotional state follows a common pattern in English:
under the weather, out of character, off the wall, in the dumps, out to lunch, on the ball, in good spirits, on top of the world, out of his mind
, and
in love
. (4) It’s unlikely that Streisand was trying to say that Agassi is
au courant
or fashionable; that would be a put-down implying shallowness, not a compliment. Her reference to Zen makes her meaning entirely clear: that Agassi is very good at shutting out distractions and concentrating on the game or person he is involved with at that moment.

So these are the language mavens. Their foibles can be blamed on two blind spots. One is a gross underestimation of the linguistic wherewithal of the common person. I am not saying that everything that comes out of a person’s mouth or pen is perfectly rule-governed (remember Dan Quayle). But the language mavens would have a much better chance of not embarrassing themselves if they saved the verdict of linguistic incompetence for the last resort rather than jumping to it as a first conclusion. People come out with laughable verbiage when they feel they are in a forum demanding an elevated, formal style and know that their choice of words could have momentous consequences for them. That is why the fertile sources of howlers tend to be politicians’ speeches, welfare application letters, and student term papers (assuming there is some grain of truth in the reports). In less self-conscious settings, common people, no matter how poorly educated, obey sophisticated grammatical laws, and can express themselves with a vigor and grace that captivates those who listen seriously—linguists, journalists, oral historians, novelists with an ear for dialogue.

The other blind spot of the language mavens is their complete ignorance of the modern science of language—and I don’t mean just the formal apparatus of Chomskyan theory, but basic knowledge of what kinds of constructions and idioms are found in English, and how people use them and pronounce them. In all fairness, much of the blame falls on members of my own profession for being so reluctant to apply our knowledge to the practical problems of style and usage and to everyone’s natural curiosity about why people talk the way they do. With a few exceptions like Joseph Emonds, Dwight Bolinger, Robin Lakoff, James McCawley, and Geoffrey Nunberg, mainstream American linguists have left the field entirely to the mavens—or, as Bolinger calls them, the shamans. He has summed up the situation:

So what should be done about usage? Unlike some academics in the 1960s, I am not saying that instruction in standard English grammar and composition is a tool to perpetuate an oppressive white patriarchal capitalist status quo and that The People should be liberated to write however they please. Some aspects of how people express themselves in some settings
are
worth trying to change. What I am calling for is innocuous: a more thoughtful discussion of language and how people use it, replacing
bubbe-maises
(old wives’ tales) with the best scientific knowledge available. It is especially important that we not underestimate the sophistication of the actual cause of any instance of language use: the human mind.

It is ironic that the jeremiads wailing about how sloppy language leads to sloppy thought are themselves hairballs of loosely associated factoids and tangled non sequiturs. All the examples of verbal behavior that the complainer takes exception to for any reason are packed together in one unappealing mass and coughed up as proof of The Decline of the Language: teenage slang, sophistry, regional variations in pronunciation and diction, bureaucratic bafflegab, poor spelling and punctuation, pseudo-errors like
hopefully
, badly crafted prose, government euphemism, nonstandard grammar like
ain’t
, misleading advertising, and so on (not to mention deliberate witticisms that go over the complainer’s head).

I hope to have convinced you of two things. Many prescriptive rules of grammar are just plain dumb and should be deleted from the usage handbooks. And most of standard English is just that, standard, in the same sense that certain units of currency or household voltages are said to be standard. It is just common sense that people should be given every encouragement and opportunity to learn the dialect that has become the standard one in their society and to employ it in many formal settings. But there is no need to use terms like “bad grammar,” “fractured syntax,” and “incorrect usage” when referring to rural and black dialects. Though I am no fan of “politically correct” euphemism (in which, according to the satire,
white woman
should be replaced by
melanin-impoverished person off gender
), using terms like “bad grammar” for “nonstandard” is both insulting and scientifically inaccurate.

As for slang, I’m all for it! Some people worry that slang will somehow “corrupt” the language. We should be so lucky. Most slang lexicons are preciously guarded by their subcultures as membership badges. When given a glimpse into one of these lexicons, no true language-lover can fail to be dazzled by the brilliant wordplay and wit: from medical students (
Zorro-belly, crispy critter, prune
), rappers (jaw-jacking, dissing), college students (
studmuffin, veg out, blow off
), surfers (
gnarlacious, geeklified
), and hackers (
to flame, core-dump, crufty
). When the more passé terms get cast off and handed down to the mainstream, they often fill expressive gaps in the language beautifully. I don’t know how I ever did without
to flame
(protest self-righteously),
to dis
(express disrespect for), and
to blow off
(dismiss an obligation), and there are thousands of now-unexceptionable English words like
clever, fun, sham, banter, mob, stingy, bully, junkie
, and
jazz
that began life as slang. It is especially hypocritical to oppose linguistic innovations reflexively and at the same time to decry the loss of distinctions like
lie
versus
lay
on the pretext of preserving expressive power. Vehicles for expressing thought are being created far more quickly than they are being lost.

There is probably a good explanation for the cult of inarticulateness, where speech is punctuated with
you know, like, sort of, I mean
, and so on. Everyone maintains a number of ways of speaking that are appropriate to different contexts defined by the status and solidarity they feel with respect to their interlocutor. It seems that younger Americans try to maintain lower levels of social distance than older generations are used to. I know many gifted prose stylists my age whose one-on-one speech is peppered with
sort of
and
you know
, their attempt to avoid affecting the stance of the expert who feels entitled to lecture the conversational partner with confident pronouncements. Some people find it grating, but most speakers can turn it off at will, and I find it no worse than the other extreme, certain older academics who hold court during social gatherings, pontificating eloquently to their trapped junior audiences.

The aspect of language use that is most worth changing is the clarity and style of written prose. Expository writing requires language to express far more complex trains of thought than it was biologically designed to do. Inconsistencies caused by limitations of short-term memory and planning, unnoticed in conversation, are not as tolerable when preserved on a page that is to be perused more leisurely. Also, unlike a conversational partner, a reader will rarely share enough background assumptions to interpolate all the missing premises that make language comprehensible. Overcoming one’s natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks in writing well. All this makes writing a difficult craft that must be mastered through practice, instruction, feedback, and—probably most important—intensive exposure to good examples. There are excellent manuals of composition that discuss these and other skills with great wisdom, like Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style
and Williams’s
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace
. What is most relevant to my point is how removed their practical advice is from the trivia of split infinitives and slang. For example, a banal but universally acknowledged key to good writing is to revise extensively. Good writers go through anywhere from two to twenty drafts before releasing a paper. Anyone who does not appreciate this necessity is going to be a bad writer. Imagine a Jeremiah exclaiming, “Our language today is threatened by an insidious enemy: the youth are not revising their drafts enough times.” Kind of takes the fun out, doesn’t it? It’s not something that can be blamed on television, rock music, shopping mall culture, overpaid athletes, or any of the other signs of the decay of civilization. But if it’s clear writing that we want, this is the kind of homely remedy that is called for.

Finally, a confession. When I hear someone use
disinterested
to mean “apathetic,” I am apt to go into a rage.
Disinterested
(I suppose I must explain that it means “unbiased”) is such a lovely word: it is ever-so-subtly different from
impartial
or
unbiased
in implying that the person has no stake in the matter, not that he is merely committed to being even-handed out of personal principle. It gets this fine meaning from its delicate structure: interest means “stake,” as in conflict of
interest
and
financial interest;
adding -
ed
to a noun can make it pertain to someone that owns the referent of that noun, as in
moneyed, one-eyed
, or
hook-nosed; dis
- negates the combination. The grammatical logic reveals itself in the similarly structured
disadvantaged, disaffected, disillusioned, disjointed
, and
dispossessed
. Since we already have the word
uninterested
, there can be no reason to rob discerning language-lovers of
disinterested
by merging their meanings, except as a tacky attempt to sound more high-falutin’. And don’t get me started on
fortuitous
and
parameter…

Chill out, Professor. The original, eighteenth-century meaning of
disinterested
turns out to be—yes, “uninterested.” And that, too, makes grammatical sense. The adjective
interested
meaning “engaged” (related to the participle of the verb
to interest
) is far more common than the noun interest meaning “stake,” so
dis
- can be analyzed as simply negating that adjective, as in
discourteous, dishonest, disloyal, disreputable
, and the parallel
dissatisfied
and
distrusted
. But these rationalizations are beside the point. Every component of a language changes over time, and at any moment a language is enduring many losses. But since the human mind does not change over time, the richness of a language is always being replenished. Whenever any of us gets grumpy about some change in usage, we would do well to read the words of Samuel Johnson in the preface to his 1755
dictionary
, a reaction to the Jeremiahs of his day: