So I should have been wary when I picked up Anne Curzan’s “Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words.” “Funner” provocatively signals that this isn’t a book for someone, like me, who once devoted his days and nights to Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s “The Reader Over Your Shoulder,” William Strunk and E.B. White’s “The Elements of Style,” Theodore M. Bernstein’s “The Careful Writer,” and William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well.” Instead, “Says Who?” pointedly aims to defuse common anxieties over what is “proper” and “improper” usage.
To do this, Curzan, dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, contends that virtually every grammar or vocabulary no-no you learned from Miss Thistlebottom is wrong or out of date. In olden days, a grammatical slip was looked on as something shocking, but now, it would seem, almost anything goes. You can use “like” instead of “as” and “as if,” “who” instead of “whom,” even “irregardless,” regardless of the mute scorn of linguistic “grammandos.” For these last, the barbarisms are always at the gates.
Curzan does underscore that context and social situation should always be considered when we write and speak. As my father used to warn me when I was launching into some heated, clearly ill-advised back talk, “Watch your language, boy.” I quickly did, if I knew what was good for me. The same advice, minus the “boy,” is good for anyone. So is adjusting your words to your audience. You don’t write to your boss in the same way you talk to your children or the way you try to chat up an attractive stranger in a bar.
Curzan repeatedly emphasizes that language evolves, that we should welcome change, that new words express new ideas and thoughts. No one would argue otherwise. Yet rules define any game. Without them, games wouldn’t even exist. Similarly, the traditional principles of sentence structure, verb agreement and even spelling ensure effective and clear communication. Grammar helps us to say what we mean and others to know rather than guess what we’re talking about.
In her own prose, Curzan tries hard to downplay any soupçon of the didactic by adopting an up-to-date, friendly cheeriness. For my taste, she goes too far. She loads on the maple syrup, tacitly assuming that no one will pay attention to her linguistic points without a lot of sweetening. Perhaps she’s right, but I find this approach implicitly demeaning. But then, I would probably register somewhere in the middle of what Curzan calls her “crankiness meter.”
I say “middle” because I do agree with Curzan about the importance of what she calls “kinder,” more inclusive language and usage that avoids giving offense. To advocate for such sensitivity is a key purpose of her book. As she notes, it’s one thing to say “How tall is he?” and quite another to ask “How short is he?” Though essentially the same question, one is neutral and the other judgmental.
Yet even if we all need to be more understanding and less captious about some aspects of our changing language, Curzan doesn’t stress strongly enough the consequences of using vulgar, ugly and slovenly English. As with clothes and manners, the issue is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called the presentation of self in everyday life. Miss Eliza Doolittle can testify that if you talk like a Cockney flower girl, the world will regard you as a Cockney flower girl, but if you talk like a duchess, it will treat you as one. Fundamentally, you may be as gentle and sensitive as Saint Francis of Assisi, but if your English is loose, ungrammatical and crude, or alternatively if it’s pretentious, circumlocutory and condescending, people will think you are either stupid or a pompous blowhard. It’s hard to undo the effects of first impressions.
Verbal tics are particularly insidious. If you continually use “like” in, like, every other sentence you, like, say, it will not only drive others crazy but also brand you as essentially ditsy. If you regularly resort to prefabricated idioms — such as “at the end of the day,” “drain the swamp” or “on the same page” — you aren’t really thinking; your mind has simply turned on the cruise control.
To my old-fashioned mind, the adult use of street lingo, locker room demotic or teen slang, coupled with a lax attitude toward traditional grammar, often indicates a somewhat pathetic nostalgie de la boue. The poor and marginalized are thought to be more genuine, more vital, more imaginative than the dull middle class and the etiolated rich. It’s pretty to think so. However, my parents knew that sounding uneducated, ungrammatical or illiterate isn’t funner; it makes you a figure of fun. The world belongs to those who are taken seriously.
When I was young, I didn’t want to be regarded as a yokel, and that meant avoiding the yokelisms spoken all around me. Through language — that is, through reading, writing and speech — I hoped to better myself. I listened to recordings of Richard Burton and John Gielgud reciting poetry, Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone reading Poe’s short stories. At about the age of 14, I even unearthed a Victorian translation of Demosthenes’ orations and — this is absolutely true — was soon declaiming them to a bathroom’s tiled walls, sometimes following the ancient Greek’s training method by placing a few pebbles in my mouth. When Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography and Somerset Maugham in “The Summing Up” extolled the prose of the 18th century, I paid attention. Addison, Voltaire and Swift — these were the masters of concision, clarity, elegance and wit. I adopted these classical ideals as my own, though part of me has always secretly hankered to write with the baroque grandeur and all-stops-out organ roll of Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton and Jeremy Taylor.
Effective prose, in truth, doesn’t resemble conversation. It’s more like sculpting with clay. You start with an inchoate mass, shape it a bit, hate the result, start over, try this, try that, give up, slink away in disgust, come back, work some more and eventually end up with something that looks vaguely like a pot or an essay. Above all, though, as my favorite ghost story author, Vernon Lee, observed in “The Handling of Words,” the craft of the writer consists “in manipulating the contents of the Reader’s mind.” She added that “construction” — and that includes word choice — “means thinking out the results of every movement you set up in the Reader’s mind, how that movement will work into, help, or mar the other movements which you have set up there already, or which you will require to set up there in the future.”
To communicate ideas effectively, clarity must always remain paramount, but that doesn’t preclude an occasional rhetorical flourish or madcap turn of phrase. Nonetheless, tread carefully: Flashy prose, slang and pop references will sound hokey and dated in 20 years. That groovy Beat poetry, man, you can still dig it, though you really need to have bongos. Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flaked, over-the-top style now screams “It’s the Age of Aquarius!” While it’s essential to write for one’s own time, a more restrained diction can often result in a longer shelf life for even supposedly deathless prose.
Still, avoiding mass-speak doesn’t mean you should go panting after show-offy, recherché diction. Anyone can use a thesaurus. Except under highly specialized circumstances, most of which are hard to imagine, never, ever use “sockdolager,” “rupestrian,” “solatium” or “gallinaceous” in a sentence. All these, by the way, were recently emailed to me from a website called Word Genius. I’ve already forgotten what they mean.
Polonius once asked Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord?” To which the melancholy Dane answered, “Words, words, words.” Anne Curzan and I both love the English language, she being more accepting of the new, while I instinctively value established grammar and usage as bulwarks against confusion, not a set of fetters that bind us. We both agree that people’s use of English brings consequences, often unforeseen and unintended. All of us, then, need to choose our words wisely. But which ones? “That,” as Hamlet once also said, “is the question.”
A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words
