Sunday May 29, 2005
Imprecise speech, imprecise thinking
On television, an ad promotes a learning centre that promises to improve your child\’s grades or your money back. At the end of the commercial, a small boy says, “I didn\’t use to like reading. This course showed me how fun reading could be.”
I called Canadian Tire to ask about a pair of sunglasses possibly left behind while daughter Sharon was having a tire repaired. “Nope,” said a cheery voice. “If she left them here, me or my partner would of seen them.”
If you don\’t see anything wrong with either of those two examples, you need remedial training in basic English grammar. (So, incidentally, does Microsoft\’s grammar checker, which failed to note any faults.)
In high school, a student in my class uttered the phrase “between you and I.” Our teacher, Jean Skelton, explained that “between” was a preposition which must be followed by pronouns in the objective case. Then she made us repeat, in unison, for several minutes, “between you and me, between you and me, between you and me…”
Figure it out!
The English language is under attack. Even on the mighty CBC, once the arbitrator of proper speech in Canada, host Ralph Benmergui referred to taping a conversation “with her and I.”
Such phrases betray an increasing sloppiness which, I suspect, will end up with English losing any distinction between subjective and objective. But in the meantime, the abuse grates on my ear.
The test for correctness is simple. The error usually comes in phrases that include a preposition of some kind — with, from, to, for — followed by reference to two or more people connected by “and.” The singular rarely causes a problem. Most people know to say “with me,” not “with I.”
“With her and me” is simply a shortened form of “with her and with me.” Why, then, would anyone substitute “with her and I”?
Worse, why would they start a sentence with “Her and I went shopping.” Would they say, “Her went shopping…”?
Well, maybe they will, one of these days.
Victim of too much to learn
There was a time, not that many years ago, when school students were drilled in parsing sentences. They learned to identify the various parts of speech — nouns and verbs, prepositions and conjunctions, adverbs and adjectives, tenses and cases… Most students hated it. I suspect all but a few teachers did too.
Knowledge, in the meantime, has grown exponentially. Calculus that I took in second-year university now comes in high school. The amount of knowledge in the world has more than doubled. The number of published books and scientific papers has roughly tripled.
On the Internet, Google routinely searches billions of documents for specific bits of information.
The basics of grammar cannot be learned by a brief exposure to its principles, any more than a student can learn music by being introduced to its theory. Like learning to play the violin, fluency in grammar comes only with time and practice.
The school system no longer has the time to drill students in grammar. There\’s too much else to teach.
And so our language progresses towards anarchy. It will, in time, settle out, as pidgin English did in the Pacific, to become a kind of universal lingua franca.
But in the meantime, I find the solecisms offensive. I try not to think less of their users, simply because they don\’t speak so good, but I cannot. To me, clear speech is a sign of clear thinking; imprecise speech implies imprecise thinking.
Foreign practices
Can this trend be reversed? I doubt it — especially since our immigration policies discriminate against those who might set a good example.
Years ago, when I worked in broadcasting, a group of us monitored speeches from the United Nations. Lyndon Johnson spoke for the U.S. He mangled his syntax almost as much as fellow-Texan George W. Bush.
Harold McMillan spoke for Britain. His sentence structures had about as much vigour as Anne Landers\’ famed wet noodle, but his plummy accent largely disguised their shortcomings.
Not until Pandit Nehru rose to speak for India did we realize what we had been missing. Nehru had the vocabulary, the elegance of construction, of a classically trained speaker.
And we all realized, simultaneously, why. He had learned English. He had studied English. He had never taken it for granted.
In the days when Canadian immigration policy was slanted — unfairly, I admit — towards Europeans, we benefited from a constant influx of speakers whose native language had taught them to recognize and use case endings and verb tenses correctly. Their own languages had made them familiar with the Latin and Greek roots of English.
Today, with an immigration policy based almost entirely on economics, the majority of immigrants come from countries like China, whose language has no grammar. It is ideographic. A concept is a concept, wherever it comes in a sentence. Or from Thailand, where the alphabet has 62 letters, and the grammar bears no relationship at all to English.
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If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website.
For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
On the Internet, it seems, anything goes. It\’s not couth to correct a correspondent\’s spelling or grammar. Any attempt to do so can result in “flaming,” with participants screaming at each other in ALL CAPS!!!!!!
Text-messaging on cell phones bears even less resemblance to the kind of language use that I admire. Nothing matters but brevity.
I don\’t want English to petrify, like Lot\’s wife. The Bible says she looked back in nostalgia and turned into a pillar of salt. It\’s English\’s ability to adapt, to mutate, that has made it the world\’s most popular language.
Indeed, current changes could be considered a natural extension of the way the language developed. Before the Normans conquered England, successive Viking invasions each brought variants of Norse. The word roots were often similar; the grammatical word endings often differed. So the speakers of Olde English simply dispensed with many of those endings.
Perhaps that process of simplification continues today.
But it still bugs me.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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