A proper English, or not?

A few years ago, I attended a meeting with international examiners who had flown to Jakarta with the express purpose of guiding educators here on grading their international examinations.

There was much talk of “positive marking” and the concept of not unduly penalizing students for errors but rather encouraging their efforts. This seemed reasonable enough; teachers should encourage their pupils, but then all of this went a step too far.

An examiner proclaimed that when marking a student’s essay, it was considered acceptable for the student to spell a word phonemically. In other words, a word can be spelled entirely incorrectly, but if the reader can figure out what word the student was attempting to write — well, that’s OK then.

But is it OK? With all due respect to “positive marking”, I would lean towards feeling that it is not OK. Correct spelling would and should be part of what a marker needs to look for to assess a student’s work. Within the definitions laid out in this book, this would make me something of a “prescriptivist” and a “purist”.

The author Henry Hitchings proposes, “All attitudes to usage [of English] can be classified as either prescriptive or descriptive.” He goes on to claim, “A prescriptivist dictates how people should speak and write, whereas a descriptivist avoids passing judgments and provides explanation and analysis.” It would seem that I am judgmental for upholding that there is a right and a wrong way to spell a word.

Hitchings in this book sets out a concise history of the development of the English language and as such it is a fairly remarkable and useful book, but he also proposes that there are two sides in his “language wars” — the “prescriptivists” and the “descriptivists” — and there is little doubt about which side he is supportive of in this book.

He sees the prescriptivist approach to the language as that of the “purists” who are “possessive” and “tremendously proprietorial”. He goes on to claim, “Purists exult in their resistance to change,” and furthermore they “attempt to repel lexical invasions, it’s a repression of life itself.”

Now it seems those who believe in “correct language usage” are not far short from being some kind of dictatorial force that impinges on human rights. Really?

All of this is a little too “black and white”, “us and them”. It is too simplistic to portray the realities of the world and this language world in particular as so polarized. Certainly there are those who set themselves up as guardians of a language, [one thinks of France and its protection of the French language], but such guardianship is hardly such a malignant force as to be “repressing life”.

Those who would see it as reasonable to have certain agreed spellings, uses of punctuation, generally accepted pronunciations and so too a level of structure and grammar to the language may be, at times, hung up on correctness, but such an obsession is really secondary to the key consideration of intelligibility. If we do not have some agreement on what is acceptable (indeed what we might consider right and/or wrong), then intelligibility is likely to be lost and so too is the language.

The very title of this book seems to rather concede this. We may question whether it really is a “language war” as opposed to an ongoing debate but the book’s title includes the words “A History of Proper English”.

This suggests that there is such a thing as “Proper English”. The word “proper” may generally be construed as meaning suitable, appropriate, acceptable. This in turn suggests something that is right. Indeed, the combination “right and proper” is a common enough expression to highlight something that is of an acceptable standard.

A debate over, or the pursuit of, a “proper English” is perhaps really the pursuit of the necessary. Hitchings writes, “Our desire to impose order on the world, which means inventing the forms of the language rather than discovering them, is a creative act.”

This seems to go some way to accepting that “inventing” the language is necessary and as a “creative act” is a very human and humanizing act. Without language and the commonality of language that allows us to understand each other, where would we be?

Whether there is a “war” over the language and in particular over proper usage may be debatable, but throughout this book the author has provided a breadth of coverage of the English language that is admirable. A range of topics are explored from dictionaries, (that, it should be noted, identify correct spelling) to slang and the effects of the internet. There is too considerable focus on grammarians that through history have in effect shaped and defined the language.

Language wars aside and the debate over whether or not there should be a “Proper English”, this is an eminently readable and informative book, and it seems, perhaps ironically, it is written in proper English.

The Language Wars: a History of Proper English
Author: Henry Hitchings,
Published by John Murray, 2011
480 pages