[In the news recently is a study reporting that nearly half (!) of Republicans polled say that hearing people speak foreign languages makes them feel uncomfortable. That seems sufficient excuse to post this piece, which I wrote in 2012 or so and published in The Vocabula Review, a now-defunct online journal. If I'd known the pickup driver would have his dream candidate in the White House now, I would have been less gentle I think. --JK]
Seen on a bumper sticker recently: "Speak English or Go the F*@#$ Home!" The slogan adorned an old yellow pickup, in Indianapolis as it happened, where my wife and I were spending the weekend. Here in the heartland, someone clearly felt it his right to have others speak his language, not their own.
The easiest thing to say about the sentiment is that it is idiotic. In America of all places, this "mighty nation of nations," this crazy quilt of imported cultures, what should anyone expect but a grand smorgasbord of languages? And what reigning sentiment but one of cheerful accommodation to resultant difficulties? The driver might have felt his thought was somehow patriotic; I found it distinctly un-American.
What especially galled was the slogan's disingenuous view of language acquisition. The guy in the pickup is pretending not to know (what everyone really does know), that acquiring a second language is desperately difficult and time consuming. Nature blesses every Homo sapiens with one language learned to mastery, very early on; but the original miracle is never fully repeated. Adult immigrants are notoriously condemned to incurable accents and other handicaps, and many of them, even some who are quite bright and conscientious, never do become functional in a second language. In that case they discover workarounds, like other people with disabilities. But to blame their predicament on laziness or bad attitude is ridiculous.
The command to "Speak English," thus, is pure cant, the bully's usual tactic of pretending that the victim is the aggressor. Only the second part of the slogan really counts: "Go the F$#@#! Home," a fine little nugget of xenophobic meanness. The driver wants the Other and his foreign argot and culture simply to vanish, removing the anxiety somehow implicit in their very existence. I burn to ask this fellow how many foreign languages he has learned, and wonder whether he speaks even English all that well.
So far so good, or bad; but what has been pestering me lately is a sense of unwilling kinship to the guy in the pickup. Until I retired recently, I made my living as a college English teacher; and for most of four pleasant decades, an important part of my job was to urge students to speak and write English as I thought they should, not as they naturally would. Of course, grammar and usage comprise only a fraction of the English prof's portfolio, and nearly all of us are happier dealing with higher-level issues like argument, organization, logic, and (when we are lucky) the nearly infinite range of things that fall under the heading of literary appreciation. In the end, though, burdened as we are with bales of undergraduate papers, we are the enforcers of "correctness" if anyone is. The stereotype we never outlive, because finally it is rather true, is of the English teacher as the grammar cop who proscribes ain't, corrects your who to whom, circles like when you use it five times in one sentence, and so on.
My problem, post-Indianapolis, is that the angry injunction on the pickup's bumper looks too much like the same thing: prescriptive grammar on a macro scale, tersely, with the gloves off. Indeed, "Speak English!" is something old-fashioned English teachers used to say to students with some frequency, in a spirit of sarcastic reproof, back before we all got sensitivity training. So isn't the pickup driver, in his way, the ultimate grammarian? And aren't we English teachers stealth nativists and xenophobes, though we profess tolerance and multicultural sophistication? We, too, are trying to enforce linguistic uniformity.
Of course, in our case, the students are already native speakers (leaving ESL aside for the moment), and nearly all of us (all but the incurably burnt out) feel that we are on the students' side, helping them toward goals they have already chosen, enforcing only the contract they have willingly signed. We do not command them to speak English instead of their native language (by way of a shabby excuse for pure hostility), but to speak it better (we think) because it already is their native language. The idea that we are chauvinistically imposing something from the outside, something foreign, would startle most teachers. We demand the possible, not the impossible. And certainly we do not mean to drive the students away!
Yet these disavowals can be questioned. To begin with, the difference between a foreign language and an unfamiliar or disliked dialect is really one of degree. On a near view, English (or any language) is not one thing, but a large federation, a cluster of dialects that have the potential to diverge into mutual unintelligibility — at which point we would begin calling them different languages altogether, though no one would know for certain where to draw the line. In principle, Black English or rural English or Boston English vis-à-vis whatever we are calling Standard English this week is a new language in embryo. Indeed, given the way language proceeds by endless analogy and imitation, the individual solecism might be seen (to strain the figure) as a zygote, the germ of what could become a large-scale secession ages hence. Parole, as Saussure taught, exists in a state of perpetual tension with langue; the individual speech act unsettles the language itself, however minutely, and afterwards the language has to resettle into a slightly new shape.
Now, English class devotes itself for the most part to increasing the student's expertise in those parts of the language that Standard English and its dialects have in common, the parts that are not in play. We celebrate as students acquire new vocabulary, new grammatical paradigms, new ways of turning phrases and thinking about language. So far no problem. But some of the instruction we offer aims at a more troubling goal: repression of slang, dialect, and whatever else we consider a bad habit, rather crudely lumped together and stigmatized as "awkward" or "weak" or whatever. Our way of proceeding tends to elide the problems of dialect, variation, and linguistic change. Some of what we decry as fecklessness and solecism is actually rival doctrine, effective enough on its own ground. Shamelessly, sometimes, we parse minority usage as ignorance or lack of facility — a failure to achieve our goals rather than a decision to aim for others.
Thus the farm kid who suffers my red pen in freshman English for saying "whenever" when I think he means "when," or "step foot in" when I prefer "set foot in," or "should of went" for "should have gone," or "could care less" instead of "couldn't care less," or "to no end" instead of just "no end" — somebody stop me, here — is in a different position from the immigrant assailed by a testy nativist — but also a similar one. In a way he, too, has been commanded to speak a language not his own. His dialect is not Spanish or Pakistani, but it is deeply ingrained, and it entails habits that will serve him poorly in the worlds he wishes to enter — the academic world now, the professional world later — not so much because they breed misunderstanding (though they sometimes do), but (more cruelly and arbitrarily) because they are shibboleths that instantly type him as an outsider.
So I see no choice but to pick and push, pick and push — even when I suspect that this student's prospects for adjustment are not especially rosy. Internalizing the habits of college writing is not as large a problem as learning a second language, but it is the same type of problem: how to replace intuition and experience with conscious habits that feel slow, weak, uncertain, and just wrong. Progress is uncertain, and the whole experience mysteriously stressful. Having your language corrected is never a minor operation, no matter how much polite people may pretend the opposite. If authority suggests that you have said lie when lay was needed, or imply for infer, or me and him for he and I, the worry is not that you have made one small mistake, but that you have been making it habitually for years, and furthermore that the rest of your idiolect is honeycombed with other errors at which the world has been secretly laughing. It is not your sentence that is on trial, but your background, your intelligence, and your community membership. Small wonder that English class feels like hostile territory to so many. Small wonder that, for some students, the message of the teacher's red ink seems to be not "Here's what you can do to succeed and fit in," but the bumper-sticker message, "Go the F*@#$ Home!"
Small wonder, too, that fair-minded people sometimes conclude that the whole enterprise is misbegotten and futile; that "Prescriptivism must die!" as the motto of a hard-core descriptivist blog, Motivated Grammar, has it; that we should simply let everyone speak as he or she wishes, and stop worrying about correctness. But such wishful positions bring to mind Humpty-Dumpty's claim that he can make words mean whatever he likes: he can, perhaps, but not if he wishes to communicate with anyone else. Perhaps unfortunately, languages are tight systems that permit nonsignificant variation only up to a certain point, past which they begin breaking down, or more accurately, diverging toward mutual foreignness, hurried along by the irresistible human urge to turn "exceptions" into new paradigms every bit as restrictive as the old. Apparently conciliatory though it is, the proposal for grammatical laissez-faire is really a prescription for unchecked drift and change, for Babel on steroids. By contrast the underlying motive of the English teacher's crabbing, his mean and secret pogrom against minority usage, turns out to be perfectly reasonable. He wants to preserve linguistic community rather than letting English fly apart into a thousand bits that the King's horses and men could never reassemble.
Such, at least, seems to be the implicit rationale not just of English class, but of a much broader phenomenon I call the curmudgeon reflex — that odd tetchiness about usage, well in excess of any immediate need, that all Homo sapienss hare and sooner or later reveal, no matter how much good breeding restrains them. Ask anyone, "What bothers you about the way others use the language?" Everyone has a list of peeves, but no two lists are quite the same. Or try having a conversation, some time, with someone who pronounces a key word differently than you do (for example, HAIR-iss-ment vs. ha-RASS-ment), and watch the talk grow awkward and self-conscious. We are all unconsciously overcommitted to the rightness of our own idiolects (we could never be so fluent if we were not); yet an anxious social instinct urges us to settle even minute differences before they become real schisms.
Like all instincts, this one occasionally embarrasses the educated — certain descriptive linguists rail against it like Cotton Mather attacking the Seven Deadly Sins — but it has an obvious raison d'etre. It seems that we furless primates are naturally inclined not just to learn language and use it, but to maintain it. As we mangle and twist and reinvent English or French or Sanskrit, just by speaking it, we all have to pitch in and do continual repair work, or face a steady worsening of the curse of Babel. So we nag each other, mostly in subtle ways (repeating an ill phrase with a hint of irony, for instance), and then turn and nag ourselves. The most annoying of us write full-blown essays on usage in The Vocabula Review. We also, of course, applaud graceful new inventions, usually by imitating and echoing them. The whole enterprise would be exceedingly dubious if it ever succeeded, but the point is, it never does. Correctness is not a destination we ever arrive at, but a never-ending negotiation that has to continue so that language itself can.
So what the English teacher does is only a more deliberate version of what all speakers do all the time. She is not an arbitrary dictator, but a poor devil charged with discovering some kind of comity amid the chaos of conflicting imperatives and oversure prejudices. She may be giving the farm kid a hard time this semester, but it is for his own good, because in the end she wants to welcome him aboard, not fend him off. ... But here my gaze drops, my knuckles whiten, my voice falters. I have a confession to make, on my own behalf and that of ink-stained wretches everywhere: it is not always the student one cares about.
Or say that it both is and isn't. As you slog through your stack of papers, benign reflections on your clients' long-range welfare do occasionally intervene. But the reading experience itself, the house to house fighting, is dominated by more difficult emotions: annoyance, disbelief, exasperation, too seldom relieved by the rare pleasure at something done well. What sets the red pen in motion is a swift reflex, as if you were fending off a blow, or returning one: the curmudgeon reflex, in all its surly fervor. If you don't make a conscious effort to restrain yourself — and you had better, or you will never finish — you more or less automatically circle the offending phrase, mentally trying to put it right, as if you were revising one of your own early drafts. This goes on and on, like water torture or repetitive stress injury, and unless you simply skim — a dishonorable dereliction — your aesthetic sense, your feel for words, suffers continuous offense.
About midway through the stack, or even midway through a C- paper, you find yourself in English Teacher's Hell. Your back aches, it seems that you will never be done, and you are half out of your skull resisting the compulsion to respond to each rotten sentence with a searing paragraph explaining how rotten it is. By now you have utterly ceased to care about the students. What matters is the language itself — the mayhem being done to it, the nonsense wrought with it, the evident determination of these heathen to kidnap it and take it down the road to a strange, frightening future in which phrases like text your mother and tell he and I occur routinely. It is against that that you are fighting, defending English as if it were your personal Little Big Horn. And of course you know that you will lose. It is dead certain that most of these students will continue to commit most of the same offenses, or others as bad, for your red pen is not going to change whatever it is in their twenty or so years of experience with the language that has them writing such things in the first place.
The ugly truth is this: you get the folder done by uncaging your inner yellow pickup driver. All your liberal and humanitarian sentiments go glimmering, and for the nonce you are as savagely chauvinistic as Goebbels.
But it is not the first job to get done, even done well and respectably, by the harnessing of inner rage. In fact things turn out surprisingly well. Professional discipline keeps you from writing anything really crushing on the papers, or even marking them up more than seems useful. By the time you hand the essays back, you are in a kindly mood again, and slightly ashamed of your atavistic frenzy, which like a bad dream has passed and is a little hard to remember. It even seems possible that a few of your scribbles will make an impression here and there, be internalized by some of the students as useful lessons for the future. As for the others — well, even they benefit, in some final sense, from your having resisted their depredations. It is their language too, and they have a vested interest in its upkeep.
And one final thing happens, very quietly, that shows it really is their language too. Grudgingly, unconsciously, but with surprising speed overall, your own sense of correctness, your picture of langue, evolves. The student papers are not the main factor, of course: it is the overall experience of language, in countless different contexts, that accounts for the reshaping of idiolect over a lifetime. Still it is noticeable, and a little embarrassing, that at least a few of the "errors" you once marked in angry red now slip past without comment, or even earn the check mark that signifies a basic grunt of approval.
In the end, I know where the pickup driver is coming from. I understand the sense of threat, the fear of dispossession, that the language of the Other can inspire, having periodically indulged the same passion myself, these many years, against that outlandish argot of the newly arrived, Student English. The driver is right, too, that language barriers are dangerously divisive, so that in theory it would be a good thing for all of us in America to speak English, just as it would be a good thing if all of my students wrote Standard Academic English. But it would also be a good thing if all English-speaking Americans learned as many immigrant and minority tongues as possible, and if professors became conversant in Hip Hop and teenspeak. The advantages of a common language are never in question. They are so patent and deeply felt that members of almost any group or community work continually (if unconsciously) toward the goal of uniformity, eagerly imitating each other's usages, trying to break down differences via the curmudgeon reflex, even as other pressures — isolation, immigration, invention, and usage itself — push hard in the other direction, toward fragmentation and divergence.
It is easy to imagine that English or Mandarin or some dark horse candidate will one day be a world language spoken by nearly everyone. But meanwhile America and nearly every other modern nation faces the challenge of working out compromises between competing languages and their associated communities. The classroom faces a similar (if less dramatic) problem as it tries to impose a reasonable degree of standardization without insulating itself too completely from dialect and popular usage, in a way that would both disadvantage too many deserving students and, on the other hand, cut the tether that keeps academic speech from evolving into terminal abstraction and pomposity.
How to do it? Over on the left are the HumptyDumptistas, the it's-all-good crowd, who would retire the red pen forever and simply groove on language's endless creativity and variety. I love to party with these people; but what they are really proposing is a course of pell-mell divergence and fragmentation that, if it could ever be implemented (it can't), would spark a promiscuous multiplication of dialects, languages, and language barriers. No good. So then over on the right stands my scowling Hoosier friend with his mean slogan, the embodiment of the curmudgeon reflex at its sternest. He proposes a sort of linguistic version of ethnic cleansing: all non-English-speakers must leave.
And here I stand in the middle with my red pen, my dictionary, my college writing handbook, and a short disorderly shelf of other books, occupying ground that is narrow but not, I think, untenable. My own program, aiming as it does to subjugate unruly dialects and their speakers, looks like a covert, intramural version of the driver's: a purge of unwanted usages rather than unwanted people. That difference of scale and context may be difference enough. But I would plead in addition a certain extra flexibility. His hostility is stark and final; mine is more tactical, a sort of bargaining position, even a pose, assumed as I try to tease out what the students can do and what the public good requires. My aim, the profession's aim as I understand it, is to build community, one brick at a time, by tending the social contract that is English. Of course, there are no communities without walls, and no walls without gates that are sometimes shut.
