Conservative and Proud

I’m a language conservative. Everyone who knows me knows that and I might as well acknowledge it up front. I’m not an ideologue, though. I don’t believe, as many of my fellow conservatives do, that there was once a golden era when language was carefully spoken and eloquently written.

On the other hand, I reject the position of the language liberals entirely. The bumper sticker caricature of their position is “Language Changes (so what?).” The actual argument is that “so long as we can still understand each other” is a good criteria.

Let’s start there. A good criteria? You did understand what I meant, didn’t you? Some standard should be adopted (just one) to validate language use and the intelligibility of speech is that standard. But since you know me, you might have just stopped at the expression “a good criteria.”

Criteria is one a class of words used in English and the members of this class are proving troublesome. Many Greek nouns have plurals that are more different from the singular form than English plurals are. The singular criterion and its plural criteria make up one example. Here are some others that will be familiar. Datum/data is a distinction nearly lost, even in academia. Professors have said “the data shows” for decades; now we are beginning to hear it from academic deans and provosts. The people who have a faint sense that something is wrong—or who are adroitly sidestepping the whole conflict—sometimes say “data points.” A data point is a datum. I still say “the data show” but it puts extra pressure on me, as someone who is interested in being understood, and when I get tired of the pressure, I will cave in. Is it “realistic?” Is it “cowardly?” Is it a betrayal of my “class?” Does it contribute to the decline of civilization?

So how do you feel about stigmata? “Being too “white” if you are black and being too “middle class” if you are poor are both stigmata. Who still says “stigmata?” I still see it written sometimes, but I haven’t heard it in years. I do hear “stigmas.” And, say the liberals, what’s the harm? My answer: probably none. I, myself, have always said "gymnasiums," where my father insisted on "gymnasia."

I used to be careful to say that newspapers were one medium of communication and TV another medium. I now use media as a singular form. I fought it for years because it is wrong and I am a conservative.* But usage has moved on. The texts I assign now use media in ways that alternate back and forth between singular and conservative and sometimes provide new uses that move beyond the distinction entirely.

*This was a footnote in the Word document. A liberal and a conservative are dining together. The waitress says, stopping by the table, “Are you OK?” The liberal says, as everyone now does, “I’m good.” (Theologically, this would be a controversial claim, but this is only dinner.) The conservative says, “I’m well,” and immediately wishes he had said nothing. Good and well are ordinarily the alternatives. The distinction has been set clearly in the jibe “doing well by doing good.” But good and well don’t work in the restaurant. It’s not an insoluble problem. I say, “I’m fine, thanks.” But there is a frictional cost to the language in shifting away from good/well and besides, sometimes the waitress will provoke the dilemma by asking, “Are you good?” My mind is flooded with Bible verses I dare not use.

My father’s introduction to the social sciences came at a time when folkways (cultureal habits)were routinely distinguished from mores (important cultural norms). We’ve shifted away from Greek, you’ll notice: folkways is Germanic; mores, Latin. Obviously, folkways is plural and the singular is folkway. Mores is also plural, but no one knows the singular. I have never heard it spoken in my entire life as a listener, except, of course, by me. Not that it matters, the singular form is mos.

So there’s a collection of instances. I reject the liberal position, which is “living languages change, so change is good.” I reject the liberal criterion, which I have caricatured as “it doesn’t really matter so long as communication is still possible.” I reject the idea that there is one and only one criterion. Those would be the three planks in my platform if I had a platform. So where does that leave me?

Well, I’m a reasonable sort of person, my conservatism notwithstanding. I think there should be several criteria, not just one. I think language conservatives perform a service, even the most militant among us—Lynne Truss, of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, is an example—provide a service to society. I think language conservatism which, in this paragraph only, I am willing to define as “identifying and rewarding correct speech,” serves as a counterweight to other trends which really ought not to rule us by themselves.

Those three make up my program for language conservatives. Let’s take the last one first. What other language forces are "checked and balanced" (I teach American government) by conservatism? How about “Ooooh, you talk like a white girl,” which was a criticism slapped on a very young Michelle Obama? How about being required to “make an ask” at a business meeting? What about having to say, in order to be understood, that a good running back is one who can “run vertically?” (I agree, that would be a really really good running back.) My point here is that if there were no notion of “correct speech” the racists, the barbarians, and the antigravitarians would rule absolutely and everyone would be forced to comply. The thing about egregious behavior is that it gets you thrown out of the group.

My second point is that the service language conservatives perform can be likened to the traffic lights on freeway on-ramps. They are an inconvenience—there is no point in denying it—because they make you stop when you are in a hurry. Their function is to allow “new traffic” onto the freeway at a rate that allows it to merge with the “old traffic” already on the freeway without causing accidents or traffic jams. The liberals are right when they say that language changes, but that does not establish that any rate of change is as good as any other. My position is that slow steady change in language is good. It allows new traffic and it helps prevent accidents and traffic jams.

Let me give you an example. Advocate was once a transitive verb, like identify. When someone says “I identify…” you expect him—there’s another knot, “him”—to say what he identifies. Now we “advocate for…” You don’t have to advocate anything in particular; you just have to “advocate for” certain people, or, commonly, “advocate on behalf of” certain people. We can’t use the word both ways. It will represent the people whose views we are supporting or it will represent the idea we are supporting. It will not do both jobs at once and alternating them like a committee of running backs, is worse. “Advocating for” functions like “Mistakes were made.”

That brings us to point one. My first point was that there should be other criteria than simply “is communication still possible?” What criteria? Here are some candidates. Speech can be beautiful; why not aspire to that? Speech can be pellucidly clear; why not aspire to that? “People who use language skillfully and with respect” can be an identifiable group so that people can aspire to belong to it. That’s a good thing. Careful users don’t have to be “grammar nazis.” A lot of companies pay good salaries to people who can use language well. I don’t mean just attorneys, whose lack of precision could cost a company millions of dollars. I am thinking also of a catalogue I used to get which contained delightful and whimsical descriptions of the clothes in the catalogue—at roughly triple the price you would pay for them elsewhere without the description. I never bought any of the clothes, but I relished the descriptions for many years and appreciated the companies who hired the writers.

That’s my pitch as a language conservative. It is not our job just to say No to new uses. It is our job to protect the integrity of the language as a whole by providing for the gradual assimilation of new uses, even bad ones, so there are fewer accidents and traffic jams. It is our job to continue to value language for its beauty and its clarity, as well as its short-term effectiveness. It is our job to make good usage a value on its own, so that other values, racism for instance, will not will not be able to slash and burn without opposition.

Conservative and proud.