Language Distinctions

Attempting to stop the language from changing is one surefire method of looking foolish in the future.

London 2011

Attempting to stop the language from changing is one surefire method of looking foolish in the future. You may be particular about grammar, or have a puritanical, obsessive focus on retaining traditional definitions, but your campaign to save the language today will almost certainly look, at best, a bit quaint tomorrow. To expect otherwise is to assume that the language is timeless, inviolable, that how we read and speak in this moment is solidified as correct and eternal. Yet you need only to read a grammar book or style guide from a few decades ago to see how quickly the contemporary becomes the antiquated. What was standard yesterday doesn’t quite work today, just as tomorrow’s standard probably sounds a little tinny to our ear—we’re simply stuck in the middle, merely borrowing the language for a short time.

In most language debates, however, the crowd still splits into two not exactly handy groups. If you’re persnickety about language, exacting in your demand for an allegiance to grammar rules, you’re typically called a prescriptivist. These are the wonderful pedants who turn red-faced when less is used instead of fewer or when literally is used figuratively; these are the classicists who rage at misplaced commas and forgotten possessives and porous definitions. And once you shove those aristocratic prescriptivists against one wall, you’re left shoving the idealistic, dreamy crowd that remains against the other wall. In this second group you have the descriptivists, or all those who deem the contemporary use of language an organic manifestation, always in flux, with meanings and grammar and speech patterns lacking any timeless rules that must be defended. These are the linguistic Bolsheviks, and they’re rather pleased to burn your language textbooks and accede to the vernacular of the street—with linguistic history the justification for permissiveness, in how cute once meant clever, in how awe once meant terror, in how apology once meant explanation.

But what’s unsatisfying about this dichotomy is what’s unsatisfying about nearly all dichotomies: it is too neat and it implies an absolute. You’re forced to choose. There’s no space for someone who is traditional about commas yet reformist when it comes to definitions; you can’t relish slang and idioms and jargon yet still want stuffy, old-fashion rules of grammar. You’re either entirely a prescriptivist or entirely a descriptivist, the assumption goes, even though nearly everyone falls between those two extremes, because most people simply grasp the language they understand, that which is most soothing and familiar and consistent, and they deem that proper.

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For my own linguist irritations—because of course that’s the point—I am most ornery and prescriptivist whenever two words become one word. If you’re feeling combative about the English language, these are reasonable places to draw lines and insist on distinctions. There’s no reason for didactic teaching, or to impose artificial standards, but certain nuances are useful and worth preserving. It is tricky to imagine that losing a precise word doesn’t make articulating a precise sensation more difficult.

A useful distinction once existed between regret and remorse, for instance, but that seems to have slipped away. Regret was reserved for negative feelings about an action that you didn’t do; remorse was reserved for negative feelings about an action that you did. So you can regret not studying for your literature class, but you will have remorse about your poorly-written essay. I wouldn’t argue that losing this distinction means that we lose our ability to spot the distinction, but I would argue that the loss degrades our ability to be precise and articulate and evocative with our words.

The words abuse and brutalize have also, rather noticeably, lost any subtlety. To abuse implies that you are, among your many hobbies, active in mistreating someone, in whatever form you might find most pragmatic. So the literature teacher can abuse the students by forcing them to read boring novels. To brutalize, however, is how you, as the abuser, are affected by all that abuse you dispense. It is what redounds to that same literature teacher after years of badgering young students. Whether it comes to understanding disputes, relationships, even public policy, this seems like a handy distinction, which is made sharper once you realize that brute is the root. The facile cliché that power corrupts is tossed around often enough, but does it really conjure the consequences of unjust power upon the powerful? Here’s the progression: inflicting abuse brutalizes the prison guard; permitting abuse to continue brutalizes the warden; ignoring abuse in prisons brutalizes the society. What other word do you grasp after this distinction is lost?

Jealousy and envy are two more words with slippery definitions. Most people use them interchangeably, but it is worth preserving jealously for defensive sensations and envy for offensive sensations. You don’t want to lose what you have with jealously, and you want something that you can’t have with envy, although not everybody agrees to that distinction, which doesn’t make the desire to uphold this useful bit of prescription any less important. For me that conclusion isn’t based on tradition, or on a reading of any particular rule, it is about the value of sustaining a refined, enriching distinction between two sensations.

To pretend that words don’t change or that meanings aren’t flexible will always be a juvenile tendency. It is the attitude that deems the local vernacular the proper one. It is the assumption that what you learned in school, what you were forced to memorize, is the sensible and timeless way. It is the belief that you don’t have an accent although, somehow, that accent is correct. Beyond listening closely to speech when you go for a long enough walk, skimming through any old text shows the facile nature of this attitude. A relevant example comes from Henry VI, Part III, which can illustrate how much language changes:

And yet shalt thou be safe? Such safety finds The trembling lamb environed with wolves. Had I been there, which am a silly woman, The soldiers should have tossed me on their pikes

Removed from its context, the lines might be tricky to parse, but knowing that Queen Margaret is speaking to King Henry and that she’s upset is sufficient. With just that background Shakespeare is typically more straightforward for modern audiences to follow than many people assume, though it’s still possible to be swindled by antiquated definitions of contemporary words. If you didn’t know, for instance, that Queen Margaret uses silly to mean helpless, defenseless, or vulnerable, then you have a very different impression of her point. To not know this shift in meaning is to misunderstand the entire passage.

If you view the passage through a contemporary lens, you might also forget that English once had both a singular and plural you. So Queen Margaret uses thou in the first line to speak directly to King Henry, but that distinction was too messy and much of English history is explained by the inability to express intimacy, so the more familiar, informal thou was dropped somewhere along the way, and today we’re left with nothing but a single you to reference both people you know well and large groups that you don’t know at all—which is fairly unique to English. What’s wonderfully perverse is that most modern audiences hear the more intimate you—thou—as more formal, and assume that Queen Margaret speaks in a formal manner to King Henry, even though that’s the exact opposite of Shakespeare’s intention.

Now I don’t believe that these distinctions disappear once we lose the vocabulary, nor do I, on most days, want to revive thou. The sensations still exist, and the language is capacious enough to insert the distinctions in other places, whether that’s sentence intonation or syllable stress or even in the creation of new words. Just because English has dropped a formal register that’s explicit, for instance, it can still express formality through syntax and semantics rather than conjugation. And there’s also a benefit to losing an explicit register for formality: a language with more ambiguity and confusion and doubt is a language with more literary potential. So this loss just might mean that you need to ask for clarification a little bit more during an argument in English—but I’m perfectly willing to accept that exchange for you because of the advantage this vagueness provides novelists. It is a worthwhile change, especially since you can’t corral the language even if you want to uphold distinctions.