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“One can never really communicate anything to anybody.”
That’s Aldous Huxley, British writer and philosopher, opining about the great challenge of getting your point across to someone else. Clearly he’s being wry: the guy wrote more than fifty books, not least of which is the dystopian masterwork Brave New World.
Huxley is trying to make a point here, namely that to capture something essential and useful with language one must be precise. Divest a casual sentence of so much as a vital comma and something innocuous like “Let’s eat, Grandma!” becomes an imperative urging multi-generational cannibalism.
That’s why a recent essay in the New York Times caused me a conniption. In this well intentioned but profoundly misguided essay, writer Gretchen McCulloch confuses adherence to language conventions with something akin to sponsored repression on the part of language police. She asserts,
When we write in ways that a red pen wouldn’t approve of, we give our interlocutors the chance to show that they care more about us as a living human presence than they do about some long-dead or absent authority, by not derailing the conversation with moralizing “corrections”.
McCulloch frames her essay around the modern ductility of text messages, suggesting that through our thumb-typed, intentionally quirky spellings and punctuations, culture has finally loosed its chains and broken free to speak its mind. She asserts,
In a world where so many of us have been taught to write according to a list of rules, disregarding them is a way of extending trust.
That strikes me as an idea akin to relaxing traffic laws simply in order to encourage people to pay better attention at intersections. Considering the calamitous potential of not knowing where the car next to us is headed, we count on traffic rules to keep us whole.
She works hard to make a case for the endlessly neologistic spellings now radically remaking the ways we write; check your own recent cell phone text messages for examples. But the larger theme of her essay denies the rigorous language rules that not only facilitate great literature but also the articulate though misguided article in which she’s presenting her idea. Certainly it’s true that as a medium text messages present challenges to the conveyance of tone of voice and nuanced inflection. It’s those tone of voice challenges that promoted the rise of odd spellings, strange phrasings, and emoji uber-alles in the first place. But self-consciously deconstructed text is not a reliable way to convey adequate sardonic nuance, sophisticated irony, or clarity of serious intention. At their best text messages may be amusing or informative about discrete information (i.e. what time to meet at the park), but that hardly confers lasting wit. More vitally, one must consider that a willingness to rationalize endless flexibility in the structure of language invites Tower of Babel chaos. Text messages may not be the klaxon signaling an end to all language rules, but McCulloch’s broader case implies that endless flexibility of text messages is really a weather vane pointing toward freer forms of communication.
I don’t dismiss her intentions; McCulloch has something to say here. Language, paraphrasing George Orwell, is always political. Without awareness about what constitutes “appropriate” use, there’s a risk that nameless arbiters of language rules will make decisions about what they consider valuable speech over more easily dismissed hoi polloi chatter. No doubt that game gets dangerous in a hurry, and it’s not something to ignore. The structure of language significantly defines culture, even if the primary, shiniest thing about language is the content it’s trying to convey.
Still, if content counts, then how content gets communicated relies on both the speaker and the receiver agreeing on the mechanisms of conveyance. I don’t speak Japanese, therefore a fluent Japanese speaker and I find ourselves at an impasse. We don’t share the same mechanisms of content conveyance, so to speak, and as a result we miss most of what the other is trying to say.
Rules exist for a reason, and ignoring those rules weakens rather than enables. A musician can’t simply declare that an octave include a ninth note up from the bottom. Major chords have a logic to them; they are neither arbitrary nor purely aesthetic creations. The rules that govern the structure of music facilitate fungibility. In choosing to play a blue chord, one cannot guess how to add a semi-tone. It’s precisely because there are rules from which to deviate that we understand why a major chord might instead, at a musician’s choosing, be played blue.
But rules, as the saying goes, are meant to be broken. Language changes organically, bending as it must to convey the ways that people communicate in new eras with new ideas. Not all changes, however, can or even should survive. McCulloch asks for tolerance in flexible language standards, and she’s right to imply the importance of maintaining a liberal, flexible attitude. The emerging change in pronoun usage exemplified by a non-plural deployment of the world “they” in place of the more restrictive “he” or “she” is the kind of anxious but essential consideration that merits reflection. Regardless of where one finds himself or herself [sic] on the political spectrum, deployment of a singular “they” reflects real changes in the ways people need to convey meaning as cultural conventions modulate. Conventions change, language responds, and language mavens must adapt.
That said, not all changes should be adopted as new Hoyle simply because they’re common. I can’t imagine McCulloch would support the widespread adoption of “ain’t” as a legitimate contraction of “is not” despite its widespread use in spoken language. Clearly we all understand what the word means; understanding is not the problem.
There’s no doubt that language rules can act as heavy hands in terms of defining cultural norms. How we say what we mean, on screens or in words spoken aloud, amplifies political structures and must never be taken as imperturbable. Language needs room to breathe, but in so doing, it cannot be allowed to act like the hot breath of an uncontrolled mob.
It’s ironic that I regard McCulloch’s essay as so profoundly misguided because I also profoundly understand the spirit that moves her to write it. She’s asking us to eschew establishment norms in favor of more inclusive, more expansive ranges of meaning and culture. We agree! Language does change. Nonetheless, even with changing rules, the basic construction materials and architectural mandates that govern language can not become arbitrary. Change comes, but it had better come with cause. (Don’t get me started on why prepositions shouldn’t end a sentence!) I’d never consider minimizing the value or truth of dialect in dialogue, written or spoken; that’s why dialogue makes for good character development. But given a red pen to review soberly how those same words might best convey their meanings, I’d be obliged to suggest gently that precise punctuation and spelling are not about keeping people down, just as requiring turn signals at intersections does not restrict freedom of movement. Sure, you can drive off-road, but you can’t expect everyone to want to ride with you. More specifically, the further off road a driver deviates, the harder it is to keep track of where he or she may be headed.