The Improvisation of Language

Tuesday was, like every twist in this mesmerizing campaign season, interesting. But we linguists were equally bemused by the fact that it was also National Grammar Day, sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar.

The idea was to speak up for "good clean English cast well."

Noble notion. Writing, for example, is one thing. I can go along with a concern for missing apostrophes.

But when it comes to complaints like irregardless isn't a real word, that we should use fewer rather than less with countable things such that "She has less marbles than Marcia" is "wrong," or that it's feeble-minded to resort to utilize because we already have use, the folks at SPOGG lack historical perspective.

In the 19th century there was an argument that to say, "The first two customers will get a set of dishes" was imprecise. Grammarians proposed that first two referred to the first pair amidst a sequence of pairs, such that there would be a second two and a third two. To refer simply to the initial two in a sequence, one was to say, two first: "The two first customers will get a set of dishes."

Now, that makes a certain sense. However, to us, the notion that saying the first two interferes with clarity and is not "cast well" looks almost humorous.

Back then it also was considered a little coarse to say, "There's a house being built across the street." One was to say, "There's a house building across the street." Yet if you think about it, "There's a house building" is open to misinterpretation. One might ask "What is the house building?" "There's a house being built" is more precise. Yet way back when, it was a no-no.

Edith Wharton's characters, in all of their upper-crustiness, say things different from what we think of as "proper." In "House of Mirth," Ned van Alstyne says, "Fifth Avenue is so imperfectly lighted." Shouldn't that be lit? Not to someone using "English cast well" in 1905.

Whether it's a sniffy Victorian with three names or a blogger today, the grammatical hedge-clipper is like someone opposing the law of gravity. Grammar is always shaggy. Today's grammar police are cuddlier — SPOGG offers a recipe for turkey chili because it's good for the colon, get it? — but engaged in just as idle a pursuit.

Hoping that only English out of the 6,000 shaggy languages in the world will somehow not be is like being angry that your four-year-old doesn't color strictly within the lines, supposing that if you yell at her enough she actually could, and neglecting what an intelligent, creative being she is in the meantime.

This grim quest to make English color within the lines has had but one modest success: the idea that "Jack and me went to the store" is wrong because "me" is not a subject pronoun.

Never mind that in some other languages no one has any problem with the same "mistake." Try saying in French Jacques et je rather than Jacques et moi and watch your interlocutor switch to English quietly appalled at how useless your French is.

Yet this "me" business is harped on so much that English speakers internalize a sense of shame about it, and learn to observe the rule without thinking.

But then, frequently they internalize not that "me" is not a subject, but just that one does not say "me" after the word "and." Hence the common "between you and I," which gives the grammar police something else to harrumph over.

National Grammar Day means trashing people, when our public discourse already swarms with recreational abuse. Plus, talk about the law of gravity — what about gravitas? The country is watching to see whether the first serious female candidate or the first serious black one will get the Democratic nomination, and some prissy grammar hounds elbow for space on that same day to tsk-tsk about people using the word liaise?

Languages grow systematically, but always taking time for improvisation — like toddlers. This week I read of someone referring to the Obama phenomenon as "omentum" — evidently interrupted on Tuesday. "Not a real word" — okay, but it reminds me of another instance of linguistic creativity that is now proper English.

"Hangnail" began as "ang-nail," referring to the pain connoted by the root in "anger" and "anguish." The assumption that "angnail" was a matter of Eliza Doolittles dropping an "h" and that the word referred to the hanging of skin around an ingrown fingernail started as a misinterpretation. Today no one cares: even SPOGG will spearhead no movement to return to "angnail."

This is how languages develop. The gradual accumulation of "mistakes" is precisely what has morphed English from the language of "Beowulf" to the language of this newspaper.

That is: Modern English is really, really bad Old English.

Who among us see that as an occasion for a day of mourning?

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.