elegant variations and all that

Here’s an article I found while reading about the guy whose quote inspired my blog title. It’s a review of his revised edition of Fowler’s guide to modern english usage, which was originally one of the most staunchly prescriptivist style guides in existence, and which Burchfield substantially (and controversially) reworked in accordance with his more descriptivist philosophy.

Based on this article, Fowler sounds fucking hilarious, often unintentionally so. Just check out this melodramatic list of fire-and-brimstone adjectives culled from this article alone: linguistic errors are absurd! Ludicrous! Wrong! Ugly! Needless! Barbaric! Worse than electrocution! Inexcusable! Fit for parrots!

…fit for parrots is definitely my favorite. I’m stealing that.

I view the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate as a problem of finding the appropriate balance on a continuum, not as a binary question. On some level you can’t deny that clear convention-abiding speech tends to be more expressive and easily interpretable by a broader swath of society. However, there’s a difference between “ME NO CONJUGATE VERBS”-level of ungrammatical speech and things like using ‘impact’ as a verb.* Plus, prescriptivism is often tied up with oodles of latent class bias — in its strong form it often strikes me as a way of conferring false legitimacy on not taking marginalized people’s viewpoints seriously (since dialect and education are pretty strongly tied to other forms of social stratification). Fowler’s alarmist rhetoric about bastions of civilization being corrupted by the unwashed masses seems to align with this.

…Although, I’m intrigued by how Fowler reconciles his moral outrage with this (also pretty awesome) quote:

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; & (5) those who know & distinguish. . . . Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, & are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes.

Intuitively it does seem that not all speech is equally clear and effective, but crystallizing these hazy notions of clarity into a book about how to use words is really tricky, since ‘English grammar’ is really more a set of emergent regularities than a unified static entity. Plus, since language shifts are non-linear, there’s often no good way to evaluate synchronically whether a linguistic quirk will end up becoming an integral part of future-English and is thus “OK” or will fade into ungrammatical obscurity. So, Fowler and Burchfied are both in a difficult position, given that their endeavor is basically impossible!

Burchfield was also, apparently, an editor of the OED, and was instrumental in bringing about several changes in its editorial policy along similar lines, such as allowing profanities, racial slurs and newly coined words that weren’t yet well-entrenched in the lexicon. I read another article about him that I lost the link to (and it was a pdf, anyway) that discussed the objectivity of his editorial comments (e.g. ‘-colloq.’, ‘-obscene’, etc), observed that he was often subjective and inconsistent, quoted him frankly discussing the arbitrary nature of his inclusions, and then concluded that a degree of inconsistency was inevitable because purely objective lexography doesn’t exist. Honestly, that’s probably about the best we can hope for!

This post is disjointed because I have to leave work…and GO!

*Yes, I’m still bitter that I wasn’t allowed to do this in my senior thesis in college.