Proper English

This article, via AL Daily contains at least one good point. The underlying argument seems to be that English speakers make class judgments based on the degree to which a speaker or writer conforms to the norms of proper English and further, that this way of making judgments is deeply entrenched and not likely to change soon. Therefore, she argues the following. Telegraph | Opinion | You pour thing, if you don't see the point of spelling correctly : "A lot of nonsense is talked about 'proper' English being a means of endorsing the existing social status quo. My feeling is that the opposite is true. If you encourage people to write the way they talk, class divisions are ultimately reinforced, even exacerbated. I'm a working-class girl who read a lot of books and grew up to - well, to write this piece in The Telegraph anyway, so maybe I have an old-fashioned view of education as the instrument of social mobility. But it's pretty clear to anyone that, if children are taught that 'getting the gist' is sufficient, everyone stays where they are."

What she doesn't successfully argue is that there is something inherently better about proper English compared to other forms of English. She hints at an argument that the aesthetics of proper English are superior to non-standard English and that the expression enabled by proper English is uniquely capable of transcending communication into something artistic and expressive, but it's just a brief hint, not a good argument.

This woman wrote a punctuation guide which was recently published and a few weeks ago a read a couple of reviews of it. Scathing. Here are some of my favorite parts of the review out of the New Yorker:

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: “You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors.”

We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write “Who said ‘I cannot tell a lie?’”) ... And it is stated that The New Yorker, “that famously punctilious periodical,” renders “the nineteen-eighties” as the “1980’s,” which it does not. The New Yorker renders “the nineteen-eighties” as “the nineteen-eighties.”

Then, there is the translation problem. For some reason, the folks at Gotham Books elected not to make any changes for the American edition, a typesetting convenience that makes the book virtually useless for American readers.

The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.

"I am not a grammarian,” Truss says. No quarrel there.

Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation?

“Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is really a “decline of print culture” book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised).

It's one of the best reviews I've ever read. It's quite long, but I recommend reading the whole thing. It includes a nice discussion about the philosophy of writing. For example,

The other reason that speech is a bad metaphor for writing is that writing, for ninety-nine per cent of people who do it, is the opposite of spontaneous.

Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print.