“Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can, that is the only secret of style.” ~Matthew Arnold
When I was in high school, I took the first of several German classes. On the first day, my teacher said, “I am going to say one sentence in German and one in French. I want you to tell me which one you think means something nice and which means something… not so nice.”
After hearing each one, it was unanimously voted that the French phrase was lovely and the German sentence was awful, and possibly profane. Turns out, he said “I love you and I think you are a wonderful person,” in German. The French?
“You are a pig and your presence sickens me.”
I once stood on a subway platform and listened to two girls in school uniforms talking for about 10 minutes, wondering what language they were speaking. After very careful inspection, picking up a few recognizable words here and there, I realized they were actually speaking English.
It brought up the question: Is the way we speak a matter of right and wrong, proper or improper? Or, because of its vast influences, has it simply become a matter of the taste or preference of who is communicating?
Originating from Germanic roots, English is often broken down into three periods: Old, Middle, and Modern English. The English language is spoken by approximately 470 million people throughout the world and is the official language of 45 nations. It is the most geographically scattered of all the languages.
Because of this, it is widely influenced by the culture in which it is spoken. Its expansion alone lends it to variance. There are three major parts of language that change over time: vocabulary, sentence structure, and pronunciations.
All of these are influenced by where a person lives, their age, education, social status, and community. By its very nature, language is constantly shifting and changing. Where do these changes in language start?
According to Linguist David Lightfoot, “Children serve as agents for language change when, in the process of learning the language of previous generations, they internalize it differently and propagate a different variation of that language.”
This manipulation is influenced by changes in both culture and education. But maybe it is not these subtle changes of our language over time that create problems, but the alteration without any adherence to the standard.
It would be impossible to pin point one thing that single-handedly changes the way we speak, but one major influence in our development and use of all things grammatical is simply reading.
Mingling among both education and culture are our old friends, books, newspapers, and magazines. How much a person reads greatly influences the command they have over the language they speak. Countless studies show that reading improves vocabulary, and as one expands their vocabulary, their written and spoken language is greatly improved.
These three forms of communication are tied together, and as one fades out, the others are bound to show the strain. With our shift towards all that is electronic, there is so little emphasis on reading in our daily lives, both as children and adults, that most of us are only exposed to reading in an educational or institutional setting.
On a daily basis, our communication is based in texting, instant messaging, and emailing. In our electronic communication we don’t capitalize proper nouns, we leave out apostrophes, we LOL and LMAO (when its really funny) so frequently that most of us cannot even remember the rules of grammar we learned in elementary school.
Without the balance of an expanded vocabulary and a regular exposure to a standardized sentence structure, spoken English becomes completely changed, holding onto almost none of its standard form and rendering it, at times, unrecognizable. It seems these willy-nilly changes and alterations we make to our language without any observance of standard rules is what creates a verbal communication that is unrecognizable to others who speak the same language.
Some may argue that showing the diversity of the English language is not a true “problem.” Why does speech need to hold onto any form of standardization?
To quote Hemmingway, “The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.”
In other words, you have to know the rules before you can break them.
Communicating effectively is greatly rooted in the idea of knowing what to use and when to use it. An adherence to this “time and place” train of thought would be to eliminate many of the issues that people find disturbing about the general population’s lack of proper speech.
As an English tutor at a local college, I recall reading freshman composition papers and seeing a very common theme among those who were having difficulty with their papers in English class. They were writing an academic paper as if they were speaking to their friends.
What’s wrong with that?
The problem is that English comp teachers do not (usually…) hang out with their students and the message you are trying to convey is completely lost on her or him. Knowing how to use proper speech and grammar helps you to express your thoughts on a more universal scale.
The English language has one of the largest vocabularies; the more familiar you are with it, the more accurately you will be able to articulate what you are trying to say. When we completely abandon the “standards” and “rules” of the English language, we are not really adding anything, but isolating ourselves from effective communication.
Everyone is guilty of being a grammar rebel at some point or another. It’s about setting. It’s about time and place. One might think of knowing the rules of proper grammar like a well placed arsenal: You won’t always want it, but it’s good to know you have it when you need it.
