Your Grammar Wears Army Boots: In Defense of English

n which I protest against the impertinence and impossibilities that pedants and other purveyors of proper, impractical English would impose on our pens, and propose a new paradigm - a place where language is fettered only by the ingenuity of the writer, rather than the chains of convention.

I have, in the past, written essays criticising the concept of the ‘proper’ essay, and essays attacking our choice (Hmm, perhaps not the right word) for Standard English: Area of Study: Core Text. This does nothing else but prove the fact that I am the most boring writer in existence. I did try and write something else, but since I was essentially trying to copy someone else’s words, I gave up and posted a link to the original essay.

So now I will return to your regularly scheduled programming of criticising English, except this time I won’t restrict myself to petty matters of school and state, but instead a long-standing and entrenched attitude in English teachers, users, purveyors and self-absorbed hypocrites everywhere: the idea that there is a ‘correct’ English.

It sucks.

But not only does it suck; it sucks to the detriment of the expressive capabilities of the language itself. If language was music, “linguistic prescriptivists” (as they are known) are the ones who complain about disharmonic chords, ignoring the Mozarts, the Beethovens, the Schuberts and so many more as modernist rubbish.

The idea is, essentially, that grammar – the rules of English –is immutable and immortal, that there are real words and fake words, and that the language of Austen and Dickens is the kind of turgid nonsense that we should all be spouting in our essays, in our classrooms and in general conversation. This is absurd, it is implausible and it is wrong.

Our language, to steal an analogy from Stephen Fry, can be compared to the city of London. Its layout was inherited from the Romans, who imposed their design upon it some 2000 years ago. Waves of German, Saxon, and Norman invasion turned it into a medieval warren of winding streets, punctuated by towering cathedrals and reflecting the class structure of the day. The Tudors brought a revival, with greater emphasis on classical elements and themes, followed by the Georgians and the Victorians, who gave us squares and avenues, warehouses and railways, libraries and schools. In the twentieth century, a new architecture arrived – concrete and glass rose up to the sky, and every house was influenced by immigrants, fleeing every type of despair and poverty. All eras, all invaders, all developments, all immigrants, all and each and every one of them bringing new diversity to a language that is now infamous for exactly what makes it grand – being a contradictory Hodge-podge, a salad of expressions. Glass and concrete sentences consisting of half-timbered Tudor words, themselves harking to the days of bygone Rome.

This is my point: that our language is unique in the size and multitude of its vocabulary, in the variety of words – every one with subtle distinctions of meaning – for the precise reason that pedants hope to slow. English is what it is because it has adapted. Changed. Grown.

I realise, as I write this (at one thirty in the morning), that some of my readers will be thinking that the only way to crown these double-standards would be to crush the writer with a crate of hippos. It’s true, that I practice a lot more linguistic snobbery than I preach. I hate the use of ‘hahaha’ as a comma, or the ending of absurdly misspelt sentences with three smileys just in case the aim of the comment was lost on me. I simply don’t get the point of chained lol’s. (Laugh out laugh out laugh out loud? I think?) And the less I say about Americanization the better (sic). But just because I do not follow my own doctrine does not mean my doctrine loses its relevance, its veracity, its truthfulness, consequence, significance, importance or bearing. (See what I meant about synonyms?)

In the past, when I have voiced this opinion, people have chortled at its irrelevance. (Chortled. Remember that word.) They – and I won’t mention who – raised the point that the only reason I don’t think that the English language has or needs rules is because I can’t follow them. This may seem a bit harsh, but it is entirely true. In this essay, I have referred to my own opinions in the first person. If I were to do that in exams, I would lose marks. I have begun a sentence with ‘but’ twice, and ‘And’ once. I used ‘They’ to refer to the singular, earlier in this paragraph, and I have judiciously split no less than four infinitives, including this very sentence. I say that I cannot follow the prescriptivist rules because noone can (Noone is another word to remember). It’s alright to try, in fact it’s encouraged. But you can’t win – for instance, in the last sentence, I said “alright”. That isn’t a word. Look it up.

There is, however, a difference between the existence of proper, formal and – I retch at the thought – ‘standardised’ English and conventional English. Dictionaries collect instances of conventional words, and their conventional spelling. They are not arbitrators of what is and isn’t English, which is why they are always growing. The thing is that ‘convention’ is a word with as much application as ‘etiquette’ – there is nice and not nice, but the distinction between them is always changing. Shifting beneath our feet, and the feet of those who are convinced that it does not change at all. What I’m writing in is conventional English, although as Microsoft Word’s style checker is reminding me – in glorious multitudes of green squiggly lines – it is no where near the paragon of formality that our teachers and markers require. This is deliberate, a conscious spit in the face of those for whom language is a zero-sum thing, incapable of growth or improvement.

The pedants who enforce (in a passing resemblance to Strictly Ballroom I might note) the regulations we mortals must obey, do their work with the idea that they are bringing clarity to English. Clarity my arse. I’m writing perfectly clear terms in perfectly informal English. Formality brings clarity to English in the same way that getting stabbed in the eye brings clarity to vision. It makes communication distant, cold, and – as anyone who has heard James Phillips give a speech will attest – painfully dry. Pedants complain about signs that say ‘five items or less’ as if that phrase is incomprehensible gobbledegook, as compared to the vetted and approved ‘five items or fewer.’ Yes. That is the distinction that books are written about.

And so, it is my firm belief that – in the interests of clarity – if there is a word or phrase that perfectly describes what you are explaining, yet is burdened with the unfortunate predicament of not existing, you simply invent it.

Think of that foremost genius, the man to which we owe our headaches and woes – William Shakespeare. This is a man whose COUNTLESS, MAJESTIC, MULTITUDINOUS, contributions to English – even at a PERUSAL – fill even the most JADED onlooker with a sense of AMAZEMENT. This is the man we ultimately have to blame for our Area of Study. He literally invented BELONGINGS (the sense of humans ‘belonging’ was a later adaptation.) So why – if the English language has a proud history of inventiveness and adaptability – does the Wikipedia page for List_of_English_words_with_disputed_usage have more than fifty entries?

I am not trying to start debates about grammar or spelling or word usage. Because grammar and spelling and word usage are defined by how we USE grammar and spelling and word usage. I am trying to END debates. Pedantry only leads to meaningless quarrels when the sore and sorry truth is that you’re both wrong. And to prove you’re both wrong you need only look to poetry. Poetic license means that if the conventions of grammar get in the way of writing beautifully, then you do without the conventions of grammar. All I want to see is a world where ALL writing is done with the aims of writing beautifully. I would see a world where the greatest writers among us do not write the best because they follow the rules, but rather break them; coining new words and phrases without batting an eyelid because that is what good writers do, rather than being constrained by the limited palate of available and accepted words. In an analogy to artists, we are stuck using tubes of store-bought paints, never allowed to mix them to produce a whole new world of colour.

‘But new words are ugly,’ the pedants whinge. No, they’re only ugly because they’re new and unfamiliar. Neologisms can only add strength to our language – it cannot detract. And for new speakers of our language, neologisms could potentially make the whole process easier. For instance, we say anyone, someone, everyone, but for some reason, no one. I told you to remember that word. That space would have caused countless new speakers of English heartache, which is why I do away with it whenever I write it. Because I hope that if enough people use our language with rationality and beauty in mind, rather than tradition and convention, our language will improve, evolve, and in all hope – grow.

And don’t complain to me that such changes would somehow corrupt English. Our minds are designed to pick up new words and their meanings as quickly as can be. Do you remember our other word for the day? Chortled came originally from the Lewis Carroll nonsense poem Jabberwocky. But because it succinctly and accurately described a concept that had hitherto defied description – that of deep, spontaneous laughter – it was adopted as a word in our everyday speech. Most of you probably wouldn’t even know it was nonsense in the first place without being told.

Language is beautiful. It can explain, amuse, convince and describe. It can fill the reader with the deepest sorrow and the soaringest joy. It can inflame fury and provide peace. Which is why it is my deepest sorrow – my most flaming fury that instead of bringing joy, it brings slumber-inducing boredom instead. I cannot bear to write using the longest, most convoluted idioms and expressions possible where shorter, snappier phrases would do. I cannot stomach the concept that the best way to argue your personal opinion is to remove all traces of personality or opinionisation from your work at the start. I would not live in a world where there is a right way and a wrong way to write, and that writing wonderfully is a set of skills best confined to poets and lyricists.

The English language bubbles and froths with possibility. It’s high-minded phrases don’t belong in a different language to it’s gutterspeak. It is all English, and I detest being confined to using the least appropriate parts of it to convince people and teachers and markers of my views. We are being taught WRONG. Good HSC English students should be good writers, not good HSC English students. There shouldn’t be the distinction that there is.

So I beg you – all and each and every one of you. Bring something new to our language. Don’t stifle your phrases, but let them flourish. Don’t write the words they want to see, but the words that you want to use; the words that describe your concepts, your arguments, your convictions. Aim to better yourself, and the way you speak, and the way you write, and ignore the prescribed and predigested English spat out by lawyers and professionals and English teachers like the stuffy, impactless and inefficient linguistic sewage that it is. And if someone tries to correct you, smile and start spouting Shakespearean English – the English that is pure, traditional, and unintelligible. Because that is the alternative. Speak how you want, or take a course in Early modern Anglo-Saxon. After all, anything else would be wrong, right?


Adapted from an essay by Stephen Fry