Bad English - Who cares?

In reviewing Michael Savage's Stop the Coming Civil War, Walt complained that the book is poorly written. I called it "not so much a piece of writing as a collage of transcriptions of Mr. Savage's radio rants." That doesn't mean it's hard to read. Quite the opposite. It's written and edited (?) to a level which is comfortable for a reader of the New York Post or National Enquirer. You know. The ones whose lips move as they read.

If I were to calculate Stop the Coming Civil War 's Fog Index, I'd bet that the book would prove to have been edited to a reading ease level of Grade 7. That, sadly, is about right for your average American or Canadian. (It's hard to tell about the Brits. The gap between the educated and uneducated in the UK is much wider than that of English-speaking North America.)

Thoughtful people like Dr. Rudolf Flesch have been bemoaning the decline of educational standards in general, and reading in particular, for decades. Dr. Flesch's seminal work Why Johnny Can't Read appeared in 1955. He argued for a return to the phonetic (as opposed to ideographic) method of learning to read. But instead of teaching people to read better, our "educators" are now teaching people to write worse!

This thesis is put forward -- with qualified approval -- by Dr. John H. McWhorter, of UC Berkeley (where else?) in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham Books, 2003) -- winner of the Walt Whiteman Prize for Longest Book Title of that year.

Dr. John (as I'm sure he'd like to be known) is a musician cum linguist, or linguist cum musician, take your pick. He makes a good case that, in the hippy-dippy 60s, American English changed from being a written language to an oral language, written down the way it's spoken.

An extreme example -- Walt's, not Dr. John's -- would be the comparison of Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960 with Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail `72. Just the style used to denote the year in the two titles makes the point. Since 1965 -- Dr. McWhorter is very precise about the year -- authors have started to write the way Americans talk... for better or worse.

Dr. McWhorter pinpoints 1965, the year following the passing of the Civil Rights Act. That landmark legislation made it suddenly not just OK, but cool to be black. "African-Americans" (a term which would only come years later) no longer had to "act white" or "talk white" to be successful, particularly in the field of popular music. Nat King Cole was out; Aretha Franklin was in. "Black English" or "ebonics" (as progressives like Dr. John would have it) became not just acceptable but emulated by the white majority.

The result? People stopped trying to write stylish, grammatical English and started writing as they talk. This is particularly so with popular music. Try writing down the lyrics of hit songs of the last two decades, and comparing them with the words turned out by even the poorer Tin Pan Alley hacks of yesteryear.

Dr. McWhorter flirts with the notion (if not the word) of the degradation of American English. Walt would say "blackification", but of course that's not politically correct. The fact remains that even educated people, like the Prez, have adopted a less grammatical, more folksy style of speech -- "We's all jes folks heah in Nawlins!" -- and that style is reflected in much American writing, including that of Michael Savage, Ph.D.

Dr. McWhorter does not condemn the degradation of American English. He merely identifies the trend and predicts that it will continue. He's all, like, wassup wit dat? He's OK with it, y'know? Walt is not. Walt doesn't speak (or write) WalMart.

Footnote: Like Michael Savage (Ph.D.), John McWhorter (Ph.D.) could do with the services of an editor and fact-checker. "Dr. Suess" should be "Dr. Seuss", but then, "Suess" sounds more like the way the name is pronounced. Dr. McWhorter doesn't write very well either, but he would probably say that just proves his point.

Further reading: "Book Review: John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing", Wordorigins, June 2004.

For recent j-school graduates, Walt explains English "confusables"

Walt was dismayed -- no, shocked! -- last week last week to see a story in the local Daily Fishwrap headlined "EMS team repels down gorge". Apart from a stern letter to the editor urging him to hire an English-speaking sub-editor, I haven't written anything since.

Do they teach English in journalism schools nowadays, I asked. Do they do any vocabulary-building exercises? Does spelling count? Are any of these things important any more? Or do "journalists" these days rely on their spell-checkers and e-thesauri?

Walt urges journalist wannabes and other aspiring writers to remember that the computer is merely a dumb beast of burden. It does what you tell it, no more and no less. If the spell-checker, let's say, gives you a choice, you still have to know the rules of spelling and grammar to make the correct choice.

So also with vocabulary. You have to know the meanings of words in order to spell them correctly. Is it "know" and "no"? "To" or "too"? Thanks to "text-talk" the trend is now to treat those distinctions as unimportant. If you write "I didn't no that", people will still geddit...right? They won't think you mean "I didn't deny that." Right?

Then there's the matter of contractions. We're talking grammatical contractions here, not the physical kind as in childbirth. But it seems recent graduates of j-school know more about the latter than the former, as we see from the frequent misuse of "there" for "they're" or, even more frequently, "your" for "you're".

As part of our little effort to raise the standards of written English -- or at least prevent them from slipping any further -- Walt will tell you the meanings and proper spellings of these "confusables".

"Your" = possessive, "belonging to you"
"You're" = contraction of "you are"
"Yore" = a long, long time ago, "days of yore"

"Their" = possessive, "belonging to them"
"They're" = contraction of "they are"
"There" = not here, "over there"

People who call themselves writers should know the difference. If you make a mistake writing a comment on one of Walt's posts, Ed. will print it just the way you wrote it, revealing your linguistic ineptitude for all to see.