Living Language and Barry’s column
by Jean Martin
A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a book that will change my life — and to some extent Barry Bauer’s life as well.
I picked up a fairly new book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter. I have read several books about language, so I thought this might be fun.
This started off nicely.
The author spent the first chapter or so discussing, among other things, the meaningless do in our language. Apparently English is the only language on earth that employs do as we — well, do.
According to McWhorter most scholars have spent a lifetime assuming that once the Angles, Saxons and Jutes landed on the island inhabited by the Celts, the Celts immediately died and/or stopped speaking anything but Old English. The assumption was that the Celts were not just subjugated by about 200 ruffians with spears; they simply turned up their toes and died.
What is more likely is that the enslaved Celts who weren’t immediately slaughtered slowly began to try to wrap their Celtic tongues around Old English. And within a couple of generations, as the conquerors intermarried with them, Old English began to change a bit too.
Oh, did I mention that there used to be one other language that employed the meaningless do? It was, of course, Celtic.
So what does this have to do with my epiphany — or Barry’s column for that matter?
Well, as we have just seen, language changes. Just because Middle English (Chauser) suddenly appeared to give way to Elizabethan English (Shakespeare) doesn’t mean that there was suddenly some quantum leap in the way people spoke. It just means that the few people who wrote things down finally gave up and started writing them down more the way people were speaking at that moment.
And this is where Barry and I come in.
When we were in school, English had rules, lots of rules. Aside from some very strict rules about punctuation that I carried away from Albina Oille’s Sophomore English — which I intend to stay with until death do us part — we learned a few rules that really don’t make a lot of sense any more.
One was espoused most heartily by Bob LaBrie. As he used to put it, “Never end a sentence a preposition with.”
Now come on, who among doesn’t do that — often? “Where did he run off to?” [“To where did he run off?” I don’t think so.]
Then there is that old bugaboo, the split infinitive. Among our linguistic cousins on the European continent there are no other people who have to worry about this at all. In English we have to walk.
In Spanish it is andar. In German we havespazieren. Go ahead and split those; I dare you.
So today in English we might have two competing sentences.
“I really need to lighten up a bit.” That’s fine proper English.
But let’s try this one. “I need to really lighten up a bit.” Not only does it roll off the tongue easily, it actually changes the meaning just a little bit for the better.
And now we come to a change in the language that I will happily adopt immediately.
It has to do with the agreement between pronouns. Who among us hasn’t stumbled awkwardly over something like, “Above all a person should try to make himself or herself understood.” Instead let’s just throw in the towel and say, “A person should try to make themself understood.”
This language, it is a-changing.