Dialogue: Correct language deserves more than just lip service

Accepting that language is constantly changing is no excuse for being casual about the teaching of grammar and spelling, writes C.K. STEAD*.

David Hill's Dialogue page article on our changing language is a typical example of Mr Facing Both Ways.

On the one hand, he wouldn't be found dead with an ungrammatical sentence in his head or on his page, spells impeccably, and knows all the right linguistic distinctions and the traps to be avoided. On the other hand, he wants to show that he's a democrat, one of the lads, up with the play, modern.

Hill's argument is based on a false either/or. Either you believe in a hard and fast set of rules for language use, or anything goes.

Since it's easy to show (and he's right in this) that language is constantly changing and over time will break out of any set of rules you make for it, the logical conclusion seems to be that anything goes, and that those who insist that one usage is "correct" and another "incorrect" are silly old stick-in-the-muds fighting a battle they can't win.

My most recent book, The Writer at Work, contains an essay called "English in our schools," which deals at some length with schoolteachers who promote this kind of argument. It is used as an excuse for teaching no grammar, being casual about spelling (including their own), and treating any attempt to improve children's written or spoken language as a cruel attack on their sense of confidence.

There is a middle point between rigidity and chaos, and that is what ought to be aimed for. To take an example Hill offers: usage is changing, so "disinterested," which once meant "objective," is being used so often to mean "uninterested" it seems certain that that will soon be its predominant, or even its only, meaning.

I agree there's no point in attempting to stop the process - though there is no need, either, to hurry it along. However, a good teacher will teach this as an example of a shift in usage, perhaps also remarking that an educated person knows that the change is happening, watches it happen, and makes a conscious choice to use the word in one or other of its two senses, while an uneducated person manifests the change in ignorance.

On the whole, given the choice, most people prefer knowledge to ignorance. Hill seems to be promoting ignorance - for others, of course, not for himself.

Teaching grammar, spelling and pronunciation according to an agreed set of current conventions is a way of aiding good order and easy communication. It is not the same as asking that those conventions be set in concrete.

Nor is it damaging children. On the contrary, it is helping them to point out that certain uses of language will signal to those who have power in our society - and even to the nice Mr Facing Both Ways, who reserves the right to have a good chuckle at those who make mistakes - that the speaker or writer is an educated person; and that other uses will signal an ill-educated or uneducated person.

This is a fact of our society, and it is surely part of the work of teaching English to make it known.

On the subject of spelling, Hill gives the example of "Aprylle showres," which, he tells us, is how Chaucer spelled it. He suggests some of the elements - fashion, trial and error, personal preference and so on - that brought about the change over centuries, and points out that the same forces are at work in the present. "Presumably," he goes on, "14th to 19th century columnists also fulminated against them."

There were, of course, no 14th century columnists because there were no newspapers. And no one in the 14th century would have complained of any of the three spellings of that phrase I can find in editions of Chaucer on my shelves, because English spelling was not standardised until the early 18th century.

It was standardised for convenience because it made pages of printed text more immediately and unambiguously meaningful, a convenience which Hill believes others - young folk, not himself - should feel free to abandon.

As for his advice that rather than complain about the decline in standards of written and spoken language, we should laugh at the howlers it brings about: well of course, one does laugh. But it seems strange to present yourself as a liberal, humane defender of "the young, the illiterate, the deprived," and then suggest the mistakes we give them licence to make will provide us with first-class entertainment.

* C.K. Stead is a novelist, poet and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland.