English, Please!

Although I consider myself progressive/liberal in many areas, when it comes to language and culture, I suppose I side with the conservative view. It has nothing to do with opposing immigration to the U.S. to say, in this country, we need English as our lingua franca, our common tongue, since it is a major means of making "one from many" (e pluribus unum).  The community, the common good, becomes paramount when we leave out homes, and the society as a community is enabled by a shared language.

I know that, here in Florida, and elsewhere, Spanish speakers may think I am opposed to their use of their language; I am not. In many ways, having a bi-lingual culture is a great advantage, especially for children growing up with both languages.  I have no objection to hearing Spanish spoken around me in stores.

But I do believe that anyone who comes to this country to live should make the effort to learn English, which is the predominant language of our law and culture. I could not imagine living in France and refusing to learn French. If I were a resident of Paris, I would never give up my use of English with friends and family, but I would know that, to function in French, society, I need to know the language. I would not expect to vote in a French election with an English ballot. Or be given an Arabic ballot.

I say all this because, recently in New York state, a school celebrate National Foreign Language Week by having students recite the Pledge of Allegiance (to the flag and to the nation for which it stands) in various languages, including Arabic.  A better method of inculcating kids' awareness of other languages would have been to say something simple and anodyne--such as "good morning"--in Arabic and the other languages.

The U.S. media seized, of course, on the Arabic Pledge of Allegiance as a potentially treasonable offense; in fact, it was an unfortunate academic exercise. But it was a reminder for me that, for many legally and historically-based customs, including reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, only English will do.

My parental grandparents, immigrants from Germany, spoke some German to their children in St. Louis, a heavily German city, where at the turn of the last century, some churches and local newspapers were published in German. But the children knew that the expected language of public discourse, outside the family, was English. I could not imagine anyone in St. Louis, circa 1917, reciting the pledge of allegiance in German, given the anti-German sentiment of the time.

Today's culture is different; the patterns of assimilation over the past fifty years have taken a different turn. To find an employee in a public place who speaks only Spanish or Portuguese or whatever is objectionable; he or she should be bi-lingual, able to function in a society where the majority of people have always written and spoken in the English language, which is the de facto official language of the United States and a source of what unity we have amid all our rich diversity.

Hyped Language, Bad Writing

As a teacher of writing, I usually show students examples of good prose style in the hope that they will learn from the masters what makes a memorable sentence.  I rarely exhibit examples of awful writing.

This week, however, in editing a thesis on the education of nurses, I once again encountered an example of the worst kind of academic prose, the kind of pompous, inflated, jargon-filled sentences that seem designed to impress one's colleagues.  Even English professors, alas, resort to such writing to be current. And their work needs to be exposed as dangerous and fraudulent.

The thesis in question exhibits the type of deadly language that George Orwell memorably deplored in 1946 (his classic essay "Politics and the English Language"). There he noted the linguistic fog that tends to obscure clarity and fresh thinking because writers tend to rely on ready-made phrases, not just in political discourse but in most fields. If only he were still around to see how educators themselves pass on bad writing habits to their students!

How else explain my nursing student's reliance on articles and books that are filled with passive verbs and sentences that seem designed to deaden the brain. Consider:  "A database must be created though the use of multiple sources of evidence by preceptors in their perceptions...."  Can you imagine 112 pages of this?

This piece is all about the perceptions of preceptors (a repeated phrase) and the preparedness of student nurses: simple ideas dressed up in the most tacky style imaginable, a style in which simple verbs (measure) are converted into windy verb phrases (perform a measurement). Why? Because that is the way the experts write, and my poor student is afraid to deviate from the style advocated by her professors and the scholars admired by those professors.

This is the Read, Write, and Regurgitate School of Writing, just as widespread today, if not more so, than when Orwell criticized it. It led me to a dramatic decision today: I will edit no more theses or dissertations.  I do so not for the money, which is negligible, but to be helpful to students, many foreign-born, who need guidance in their use of idioms and grammar.

The type of jargon-filled prose I so strongly oppose has little to do with grammar. It has to do with an inflated type of writing so far removed from the way English is spoken as to constitute a foreign language, a dialect spoken by many--too many--who consider themselves elite. 
What can I do besides refusing to read such stuff? Like chemical pollution, it will always be with us; it won't go away, and any effort to rewrite awful sentences more effectively is met with resistance.

So I must try my best to keep writing clearly and honestly, to read only the best writers, and to encourage those I know to do the same.

Disruptive Language

Just when we think we know what English words mean, they change. Take "disruptive," for example, which used to be a bad thing, as when kids disrupted classes with various disturbances.

Now--but for how long?--it can mean "innovative," thanks to a Harvard Business professor, Clayton Christiansen, whose 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma gave the word a positive thrust, a new bit of jargon that the business world has picked up on: the idea of a disruptive innovation in the status quo.

For a critique of the social and implications of this usage, see the piece by Judith Shulevitz in the New Republic (Aug. 15), who says that "disruptive" has replaced "empowering" and "transformational" as buzz-words.

A more serious linguistic problem, it seems, is posed when words are thought to mean what we all have agreed they mean and begin to be used--like hoi polloi--to signify the opposite of what the dictionary records.

Consider "literally," which quite often no longer means literally but its opposite, figuratively, rather than exactly.  Martha Gill in The Guardian has a recent piece on this. She suggests that the word is best avoided at present. Soon, like tattoo craze, it will fade.

She is referring to such popular usage as "I could literally eat an entire cow," when you want emphasis and don't really mean literally at all. Dictionaries, ever vigilant, have begun to record the newer usage, one of them stating that "literally can be used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling."

In other words, language doesn't necessarily mean it did until recently; and English, like the vines in my yard, is growing out of control. But before we panic, remember that at issue is conversational, colloquial English, not the written word. What is colloquial can rapidly change. The issue is not serious.

Writers, we must hope, will be more conservative and traditional in using "literally" to mean literally, not that disruptive newer usage.

Language Matters

A few related items from my in-box:

1. "I lied, but only briefly,"  Manti T'eo reportedly said, according to a cable news headline I recently saw. Reminds me of being sort of pregnant. He was referring to a dead girl who never existed. Notre Dame should mandate a course in ethics and one in logic for this guy.

2. Speaking of logic reminds me that I keep hearing the phrase "begging the question" in the media when the speaker really means, "that raises the question" (of whether Hillary Clinton will run...or whatever).  To beg the question has a specific meaning in logic as a fallacy in reasoning, in this case assuming something to be true that needs to be demonstrated.  For example,  "Why do we let the city cheat us this way?"  First, the speaker/writer has to prove that the city is in fact cheating the people.
The broadened use of such a phrase, with no awareness of its essential meaning, often happens in language when phrases floating in the community soup get picked up and become trendy.  "Begging the question," for some reason, has become trendy.

3. A government economist quoted in the NYTimes recently declared that the budget bill passed by Congress is "no existential threat to the overall U.S. economy."  Did he need that word "existential"?  Does it add any meaning?  Did he or she mean, "real"?  Everyone who writes for the media or speaks to the press should read George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language" once a year to remind themselves about meaningless phrases and the abuse to clear thinking caused by jargon.

4. I am tutoring a high school boy, who is now studying, week by week, a list of words for the future SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) required by colleges. Without going into the usefulness of this test as a means of determining intelligence or academic skill, I can only say that the list of 20 words, which he commits to memory each week as if they were in a foreign language, are taken out of any context.  He does not see how they are used in sentences, and so they mean little to him.  I notice most recently the following words:  assiduous, penurious, recondite, and puissant--all very bookish, the last of which I associate with Milton's Paradise Lost (1667).  I can't recall seeing any contemporary writer using this recondite word (or that one either, very often). Why is the teaching of English in secondary schools not more enlightened?
 Brute memorizing, like cramming, can be done, but the learning value of such studying is limited. Why not relate the words to texts the students are reading?  Sound obvious?  It is!