Unlike the official idea of the French language being conserved and defended by the Académie Française, English (in all its varieties) is a language that is constantly re-making itself. Of course, the actual French language spoken by actual French speakers is also evolving in all kinds of interesting ways, but the Académie tries to do everything it can to keep French, well, French. English isn’t like that. Still have that dictionary out? Thumb through a bit and check out the etymology, or origins, of a sample of English words. These things come from everywhere! They’re rooted in German, English, Latin, even French; Dutch seems to have lent us some of our best dirty words (probably because all those hard “K” sounds are just funny to begin with). No wonder none of us can spell. Even though we do have a fair number of self proclaimed language experts who would like to preserve English the way they imagine it was widely written in Jane Austen’s day (and seem to be constantly correcting us as they defend what they see as the “rules”), English is basically an inclusive language, welcoming new words and usages when they seem helpful.
To borrow an idea from my IT background, English is a lot like the “open source” movement in software development. Everyone is welcome to contribute to the creation of the language and no one “owns” the final product. Because its evolution never stops, there never actually is a “final” product. This model can work miraculously well in certain situations (check out Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia, for a useful example). It can also be a disaster. Several big companies have experimented with Wikipedia-like websites, allowing anyone to post unedited messages, but had to pull the plug when they found that much of the content added by the public wasn’t exactly flattering to their businesses. Of course, this free-wheeling openness better suits Americans’ sense of who were are, whether it’s accurate or not. While the French are busy trying to protect their culture against outside words and ideas, we’re enthusiastically adopting foreign words and making up new ones. We like to think of ourselves as a “melting pot.” What could possibly exemplify this better than the big gooey mess of our language with its multicultural roots and frustrating complexities? Take the phrase “twenty-four seven,” often written as “24/7” and meant to indicate something that happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While it grates on my nerves every time I hear a middle-aged broadcaster use it, it has become a part of the language because it represents an easy shortcut for a common idea. Besides, we need it in our dictionaries just in case aliens land on Earth, find our civilization in ruins, and need to decipher what’s being shouted on all those recordings of Jerry Springer.
Think how hard it would be to get by without some of the words that have been borrowed by American English. How could we possibly describe any female celebrity without using the word diva? What would we name our new tract housing developments if we couldn’t give them an air of luxury by calling them Tuscany Villas or Casa Montepulciano? One development listed in my newspaper offered four models of homes, the Lucera, Bergamo, Marsanne and Dolcetto. Not a Williamsburg or Mayfair in the bunch. What would we call our daughters if not Brittany or one of the seemingly endless variations on the name? And we’re not happy just borrowing words from other languages; English grows with additions from all kinds of interesting and unexpected places. Dictionary publishers love to get publicity by creating news stories about new words added to their latest editions. My favorite of these recent additions is D’oh!, the exclamation made famous by Homer Simpson, which you can now find in both Webster’s Millennium Dictionary of English and the Oxford English Dictionary, which many consider to be the closest thing our language has to a final authority. How cool is that?
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Who Owns English?
While we want to make sure that we write effectively and clearly, it’s probably not even possible to write unassailable English. Unlike its French or German cousins, English is a language without an official set of rules. We don’t have a formal body presiding over our language in the same way that French speakers have the Académie Française, the organization that acts as the state-sponsored authority on French and publishes the official French dictionary. Even if you don’t recognize the name of the Académie Française you’re probably aware of their work. They pop up every now and then in those news stories on TV about the French trying to reassert control over their language by weeding out anglicized words like “weekend,” “t-shirt,” or “parking.” That’s the Académie Française in action. These reports seem to be cyclical and recur every few years, much like panic over Pit-bull attacks or threats of the imminent resurgence of bell-bottoms, but they seem to recur much more frequently when the French are out of favor and we have troops in Iraq. I remember hearing one of these anti-English stories for the first time when I was a teenager. Back then I was in the middle of spending several years being outraged by everything so, of course, I was outraged. Telling people how to speak and how to write! What could be wrong with calling a t-shirt a t-shirt! That’s un-American!
Now that I’ve spent more time trying to write clearly myself and have many years experience in trying to teach other people how to write, the idea of having a well-defined set of rules doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it sounds a little comforting. Because the way English works is very different. You can’t even get very far in a discussion of English spelling, punctuation or grammar without having to clear up which version of English you’re talking about. Is it American English or English English? The language spoken in Australia or in India? And don’t even think about going out and buying a copy of the official English dictionary-- there’s no such thing. Despite the opening paragraphs of millions of high school essays (“Webster’s Dictionary defines Freedom as…”) and factoids from an equal number of corporate PowerPoint presentations, there’s no such thing as Webster’s Dictionary. Many publishers have piled on the legacy of Noah Webster by creating dictionaries that include “Webster’s” in their title, including the Merriam-Webster dictionary-- which is the legitimate descendant of Webster’s original work. English dictionaries, even the big impressive ones with the leather covers, even the ones with the gilt-edged pages, are different than the dictionary published by the Académie Française because they are meant to chronicle the way the language is used, not the way that it should be used. Webster’s first dictionary was conceived, in fact, to document uniquely “American” usages, to show how the language had grown in the English colonies. One of Webster’s original goals was to capture the everyday language of Americans, including new words derived from Native American languages (like “wigwam”) that seemed to especially excite him.
Don’t believe me? Get out the dictionary and look up a word that your elementary school English teacher told you not to use. No, not the dirty ones (though they are there too). How about ain’t? Most of us know a little ditty that tells us that the word doesn’t even exist: “Ain’t ain’t a word/ so you ain’t supposed to use it.” But when I look it up in the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, there it is:
While the dictionary tells us that the usage of ain’t is widely disapproved, it doesn’t mind including it right along with all of the respectable words. In fact, it makes it seem kind of rebellious and cool. Heck, if Nixon is using ain’t, why shouldn’t I?
All right, then, go ahead and look up some of those dirty words. Just promise to come back.
Now that I’ve spent more time trying to write clearly myself and have many years experience in trying to teach other people how to write, the idea of having a well-defined set of rules doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it sounds a little comforting. Because the way English works is very different. You can’t even get very far in a discussion of English spelling, punctuation or grammar without having to clear up which version of English you’re talking about. Is it American English or English English? The language spoken in Australia or in India? And don’t even think about going out and buying a copy of the official English dictionary-- there’s no such thing. Despite the opening paragraphs of millions of high school essays (“Webster’s Dictionary defines Freedom as…”) and factoids from an equal number of corporate PowerPoint presentations, there’s no such thing as Webster’s Dictionary. Many publishers have piled on the legacy of Noah Webster by creating dictionaries that include “Webster’s” in their title, including the Merriam-Webster dictionary-- which is the legitimate descendant of Webster’s original work. English dictionaries, even the big impressive ones with the leather covers, even the ones with the gilt-edged pages, are different than the dictionary published by the Académie Française because they are meant to chronicle the way the language is used, not the way that it should be used. Webster’s first dictionary was conceived, in fact, to document uniquely “American” usages, to show how the language had grown in the English colonies. One of Webster’s original goals was to capture the everyday language of Americans, including new words derived from Native American languages (like “wigwam”) that seemed to especially excite him.
Don’t believe me? Get out the dictionary and look up a word that your elementary school English teacher told you not to use. No, not the dirty ones (though they are there too). How about ain’t? Most of us know a little ditty that tells us that the word doesn’t even exist: “Ain’t ain’t a word/ so you ain’t supposed to use it.” But when I look it up in the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, there it is:
Pronunciation: 'Ant
Etymology: contraction of are not
1 : am not : are not: is not
2 : have not : has not
3 : do not : does not : did not -- used in some varieties of Black Englishusage Although widely disapproved as nonstandard and more common in the habitual speech of the less educated, ain't in senses 1 and 2 is flourishing in American English. It is used in both speech and writing to catch attention and to gain emphasis
While the dictionary tells us that the usage of ain’t is widely disapproved, it doesn’t mind including it right along with all of the respectable words. In fact, it makes it seem kind of rebellious and cool. Heck, if Nixon is using ain’t, why shouldn’t I?
All right, then, go ahead and look up some of those dirty words. Just promise to come back.
Monday, August 6, 2007
A Warning
Before you commit yourself any further to Get Your Message Heard, I want to make something clear; this is not the guide for anyone hoping to learn the secrets of writing consistently perfect, impeccably grammatical sentences. We’re all busy people these days and the last thing I would want is for you to start reading this, get halfway through and discover that you still don’t have a thorough understanding of the subjunctive tense when that’s what you were looking for all along. If following along and not coming away with a definitive answer to the problem of the serial comma would leave you feeling cheated, please look elsewhere for help. Perfection is just too much for us to shoot for. Let’s face it, if you weren’t a grammar savant in high school you’re probably never going to be one. We’re just too busy, and what we need today isn’t flawlessness so much as functionality.
Besides, I’m really not the person to try to teach you perfection. By the time I went to public schools in the 70’s they had all but done away with teaching grammar and instead devoted most of their time teaching “English” to drilling us on a list of spelling words that administrators knew would show up on standardized tests. Despite this, I’m still a lousy speller and would be lost without spell-check. I wouldn’t even know where to begin diagramming a sentence, and I seem to have a very specific form of dyslexia where I often can’t tell the difference between a lowercase “d” and a “b”. Many of you are probably better proofreaders than I am so, go ahead, look for mistakes here. I’ll own up to them. While we’re cataloging my flaws, I stubbornly resist anything I’m told I “have to” do, and I tend to get way too emotional watching TV. There are at least three episodes of Futurama that make me cry-- go figure.
My main goal is to help you develop some basic writing skills that will enable you to communicate more effectively at work. The first step is convincing you that good writing is important in our fast-paced workplaces and that it is still possible in the era of email and instant messaging. It’s a good sign that you're paying attention now. All it takes for most people to make a significant improvement in their writing is to step back from it a little bit and think about what they’re doing. Because most of us who are writing badly at work don’t know that’s what we’re doing. We have no idea that our typo-ridden messages are causing us to lose credibility with our clients, that our boss never reads past the third sentence of our epic emails or that the red font we habitually use has so annoyed our co-workers that they’ve set up a rule to automatically delete all of our incoming messages. While it would be wonderful if we could all write dazzling prose, that’s really not what most of us need at work. What we need is something more utilitarian. Almost all of the writing we do in our jobs is focused on conveying information; we’re either asking someone a question that we need answered or we’re supplying information that someone else needs. So our writing should be primarily concerned with making sure that we’re getting this information across to our readers. If we don’t get their attention, if they stop reading because we’ve made them angry or they don’t take us seriously, if they can’t even make sense of what we’re trying to say, we’re not getting our message across. If our writing fails, communication fails.
Besides, I’m really not the person to try to teach you perfection. By the time I went to public schools in the 70’s they had all but done away with teaching grammar and instead devoted most of their time teaching “English” to drilling us on a list of spelling words that administrators knew would show up on standardized tests. Despite this, I’m still a lousy speller and would be lost without spell-check. I wouldn’t even know where to begin diagramming a sentence, and I seem to have a very specific form of dyslexia where I often can’t tell the difference between a lowercase “d” and a “b”. Many of you are probably better proofreaders than I am so, go ahead, look for mistakes here. I’ll own up to them. While we’re cataloging my flaws, I stubbornly resist anything I’m told I “have to” do, and I tend to get way too emotional watching TV. There are at least three episodes of Futurama that make me cry-- go figure.
My main goal is to help you develop some basic writing skills that will enable you to communicate more effectively at work. The first step is convincing you that good writing is important in our fast-paced workplaces and that it is still possible in the era of email and instant messaging. It’s a good sign that you're paying attention now. All it takes for most people to make a significant improvement in their writing is to step back from it a little bit and think about what they’re doing. Because most of us who are writing badly at work don’t know that’s what we’re doing. We have no idea that our typo-ridden messages are causing us to lose credibility with our clients, that our boss never reads past the third sentence of our epic emails or that the red font we habitually use has so annoyed our co-workers that they’ve set up a rule to automatically delete all of our incoming messages. While it would be wonderful if we could all write dazzling prose, that’s really not what most of us need at work. What we need is something more utilitarian. Almost all of the writing we do in our jobs is focused on conveying information; we’re either asking someone a question that we need answered or we’re supplying information that someone else needs. So our writing should be primarily concerned with making sure that we’re getting this information across to our readers. If we don’t get their attention, if they stop reading because we’ve made them angry or they don’t take us seriously, if they can’t even make sense of what we’re trying to say, we’re not getting our message across. If our writing fails, communication fails.
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